Cuba: Five Decades, Five Myths

By Ricardo Pau-Llosa.

Fidel Castro, 1959

The regime of Fidel Castro converted one of the most advanced countries in the Americas, in all economic and cultural sectors registered by UNESCO in 1958-59, into the poorest and most terrorized nation in the Western Hemisphere.  Nonetheless, the regime retains a cult-like status among many foreigners.  Cults are based on myths.  Here are five of them and very typical examples, by no means peculiar, which refute the myths.

Myth 1: Cuba fights for the poor and the oppressed.  

The fact that Cuba before 1959 enjoyed a vibrant middle class, powerful unions, and the best industrial and agrarian workers’ salaries in Latin America (and among the best in the world), has not dispersed superstitions cherished by Leftists against free enterprise, the only known mechanism which has reduced poverty.  Elena Mederos (1900-1981) was a premier figure in the struggle for women’s rights in Cuba, president of the Havana Lyceum, pioneer in the professionalization of the social sciences, and an indefatigable fighter for the rights of impoverished children.  In 1959 she was fired from her post as Minister of Social Welfare, a few months after being named to that post, by Castro because she did not share the ideals of his Revolution.  She went into exile in 1961 and worked with UNICEF, stationed in Bogotá, Colombia, where she left a stellar record on behalf of children traumatized by the violence of the guerrillas.  She launched, with UNESCO support, special programs for teachers.  Later, in Washington, DC, she founded Of Human Rights with the aim of divulging reports on abuses being committed by the communist regime in Cuba.

What commitment to the poor can be attributed to a government that expels Elena Mederos from her homeland and considers her an enemy?  In 1980, Castro accepted the emergence of Mercados Libres Campesinos (Free Farmers Markets) where farmers could sell their produce after meeting state-imposed quotas.  A spring of abundance took place in a hungry Cuba, but that very success spelled doom for the program which was shut down by the communists in 1986.  Hunger and poverty in Cuba are used as weapons with which to control the population.

Myth 2: Cuba is progressive and tolerant and promotes culture.

Lacking any of the usual mechanisms which legitimize a government—such as free elections—the Cuban dictatorship turned to a sector which was personally repugnant to the tyrant: culture.  The mantle of progress and freedom which art biennials and film festivals provide could not be wasted.  The reality is that only artists who are obedient to the regime are permitted to exercise their craft and art.  The regime exposed its Stalinist identity with the renown Padilla Affair, the arrest and forced confession of poet Heberto Padilla in 1971.  However, the clearest example of repression against a literary figure was that of Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990).  Persecuted for having dissident ideas, as well as for his homosexuality, Arenas suffered imprisonment and incessant harassment in Cuba.  His house was invaded on various occasions and his writings confiscated and destroyed.   Arenas, whose novel Hallucinations won the 1967 award for the best foreign novel in France, along with Gabriel García Márquéz’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, finally escaped Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980.  Dying of AIDS, he committed suicide in New York in December, 1990, condemning the Cuban regime to the very end.

One year later, in Havana, the poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela (b.1953) founded the group Alternative Criteria to promote civil liberties.  Since 1980, when thousands of Cubans sought asylum in the Peruvian Embassy, provoking the Mariel exodus, the regime had used Rapid Action Brigades—mobs at the service of the regime that accost dissidents in their homes and on the streets.  One such mob attacked the home of poet Cruz Varela in 1991, beating her and dragging her into the street.  They filled her mouth with her writings and screamed as she bled.  Later, the victim was arrested and imprisoned.  What Cuba promotes is barbarity.

Myth 3: The “Triumphs” of the Revolution: Free Education and Health Care.

With almost 80% of the population able to read and write in 1958, and with an excellent system of public education, including universities, not to mention a modern infrastructure of print media, radio, and television, Cuba had all the requirements of progress without which no Revolution would have been possible.  In name of Education, a system of censorship and indoctrination was imposed without equal in this hemisphere, and whose pursuit of absolute conformity is evidenced by the case of the blind lawyer and independent librarian, Juan Carlos González Leiva (b. 1966).  His crimes consist of lending books in Braille to friends and defending the right to think and speak freely.  He has suffered acts of violence, imprisonment, and constant threats, even when he is not in prison.

Cuba’s “free” education is paid for by students with forced labor in the fields and later with their acceptance of whatever job and salary the government assigns them for life.  The medicine available to the people is primitive and scarce, in contrast with that available to powerful government figures and their foreign clients.  No one in Cuba has the right to decide his work, education, or conditions of life.

Myth 4: Cuba promotes family union.

During the Elian Affair in 2000, Cuba boasted what it utterly lacks: the rights of parents to decide the life and values of their children.  In effect, communist Cuba has always used family members as hostages, permitting certain individuals to travel abroad only if they leave their children or spouses behind.  The great saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera (b.1948) was repressed in Cuba for playing music and an instrument officially regarded as “imperialist.”   He defected in 1980 but had to wait 9 years for the regime to permit his wife and son to join him.  As is the case with hunger, medicine, and education, families are also tools the Cuban regime uses to exercise control.

Myth 5: Cuba is sovereign and independent.

Since the Enlightenment, sovereignty and liberty have been joined concepts.  In Cuba, the sovereign is the tyrant.  Foreigners who collaborate with the regime enjoy privileges which no Cuban can dream of.  Foreigners can open businesses, travel within the country, enter and leave the island at will, and buy whatever and whomever they desire.  Cubans who demand their rights are placed on lists of “dangerous persons” who might commit a political crime or violate “socialist morality.”  Declared “dangerous” in 1994, the physician Oscar Elías Biscet (b. 1961) is currently the most celebrated prisoner of conscience in Cuba, and as such among those who receive the cruelest treatment.  A thinker and pacifist, Dr. Biscet was imprisoned between 1999 and 2002 for crimes of self-expression inconceivable to any one who does not live in a psychopathic state like Cuba, such as hanging the flag upside down as a sign of protest.  After one month of liberty, he was arrested and condemned to another 25 years of incarceration, in the most inhumane of conditions.  What do the words sovereignty and independence mean to apologists of the Cuban regime who disguise themselves as revolutionaries?

Liberty is a commitment to reality, not to myths, and it demands the abandonment of desires that betray it.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa is one of the premier art critics on Latin American art; a curator, poet and author of major critical texts.