Early this June, on a night of blackout—the Cuban night par excellence—Yunaykis de la Caridad Linares, a former political prisoner from the July 11 protests out on parole, was detained and beaten along with her stepfather in the Havana neighborhood of Santa Amalia. Her offense: stepping in to keep the agents from carrying off a minor they had singled out as the ringleader of a protest. “I was beaten and choked; one of the policemen kept covering my mouth and nose,” she recounted in a video that circulated online. It all happened in the dark, among neighbors filming on their phones and policemen in plainclothes. That same week, in universities and research centers abroad—centers that administer, let it be said in passing, no small share of the Cuban capital scattered around the world—the panel discussions multiplied once again to settle, with all the apparatus of social science, whether Cubans want, need, or deserve a foreign intervention; panels that have proliferated ever since, in January, the bombs fell for real on Caracas and the question stopped being an academic exercise. There is no rhetorical artifice in the contrast; there is merely a calendar.
A few weeks earlier, a progressive European magazine rejected a piece by one of this column’s authors. It objected to no fact, no date, no argument: it objected that the picture of the Cuban moment was not preceded by a condemnation of Donald Trump’s violations of the international order. That is: to look critically at the Cuban regime, one must first pay a toll, a kind of confessional acknowledgment of the empire’s evil; without that act of contrition, the description—of our own house!—turns out to be unpublishable. Cubans are asked to complete this formality so regularly that we have all but stopped noticing it.
Consider what the two scenes, so unequal in scale, share: an asymmetry of attention. Rivers of ink and hours of debate for a hypothetical war; a form letter of silence for the war underway. Why are we asked to fear the bombs that have not fallen and, at the same time, to keep quiet about the beatings, the arrests, the hunger, and the blackouts that are in fact happening? Why does future, imaginary violence merit panels, while present, documented violence merits, at most, a footnote? We are grieving over rockets no one has fired and falling silent before a slow death that has been administered for decades.
The phenomenon has a name, and a recent history. In 2018, in the thick of the Syrian war, Leila Al-Shami called it “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: the readiness of a certain Western left to mobilize only when Washington makes a move, while half a million dead—94% of the civilian victims fell to the regime’s alliance with Russia and Iran—does not wring a single placard from it. “This left exhibits deeply authoritarian tendencies, one that places states themselves at the centre of political analysis. Solidarity is therefore extended to states (seen as the main actor in a struggle for liberation) rather than oppressed or underprivileged groups in any given society, no matter that state’s tyranny.” Syrians, where they exist at all, are reduced to pawns on a geopolitical chessboard. Santiago Alba Rico, writing from within that very left, said it like an epitaph: Aleppo was “the grave of the left.” To kill on a grand scale, he noted, one must lie on a grand scale, and insult and despise the victims besides; and what so outraged us when the executioners were the United States or Israel became “mental routine” once the executioner was Assad.
There was no need to import the diagnosis: “The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village,” wrote José Martí. The conceited villager of our day has gone global: he reaches Ukraine, Aleppo, or Havana with a pocket-sized moral order, two slogans, and no obligation to bear the consequences. He need not live the dilemmas he adjudicates; he does grant himself, however, the luxury of deciding who is legitimate and who is not. With Cuba, a soothing “down with the blockade” is enough to install him on the good side of the world without so much as grazing the conflict those words conceal. And the regime is grateful: no government has extracted more political mileage from an embargo than the one that’s been able to blame it for each of its failures for more than sixty years.
Cuba: Citizenship vs Mafia State
The most current version of the phenomenon does not even require bad faith. Significant sectors of the international left and of progressive opinion—influential U.S. media outlets, members of the European Parliament, solidarity organizations—in their legitimate opposition to the policies of the Trump administration, end up endorsing the Cuban regime’s narratives and casting it as the victim; in the process, the demands of the independent civil society and the repression it suffers become invisible. That European magazine’s rejection was no anomaly: it was the procedure, applied with impeccable neatness. The Cuban question is thus trapped in a polarization between two blocs – the Trump administration and the regime – that need each other as mutual alibis, and that erases from the picture the most vulnerable actor: the citizenry that demands rights against the State and recognizes itself in neither pole of the conflict. The quarrel has two sides; the victim is enlisted in neither.
If we agree that the pattern exists, its mechanism remains to be understood. What must one presuppose about a people in order to maintain that its tragedy is explained entirely from the outside? One must presuppose, precisely, that it does not act: that it is acted upon. The official catalogue is well known: if Cubans take to the streets it is because they have been manipulated, because there is a media campaign, because someone paid for a phone top-up, because the enemy is pushing. The people, you understand, have no agency: they do not reason, they are not tired, they do not decide. The catalogue has, moreover, a pedigree: these are the same arguments with which colonial officials filed away peasant insurrections – “it was the heat,” “they didn’t know what they wanted” – that counterinsurgent prose which denies the insurgent consciousness in order to spare itself the labor of listening to him.
A curious thing: that catalogue is not the apparatus’s private property. An academic tendency that claims to be leftist subscribes to it in a different syntax when it turns every protest into an epiphenomenon of the sanctions and every discontent into the handiwork of Washington. In the mirror, two actors who detest each other see themselves and propose the same thing: the Cuban is not the subject of his own history. The regime’s anthropological premise and that of its unlikeliest critics coincide point for point (and the latter, who pride themselves on critical thinking, do not even lose sleep over the coincidence). Solzhenitsyn, who knew a thing or two about regimes and about those who excuse them from afar, wrote in The Gulag Archipelago that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart. All the rest – the boxes, the sides, the cartographies—is set dressing.
Latin America, Russia and the Invasion of Ukraine: A (Post-)Liberal Interpretation
“I’m an academic, not an activist”: the alibi sounds like methodological scruple and works as a moral life-raft. But to call violent a regime that jails demonstrators, manufactures show trials, and beats old women is not activism: it is description. What is militant— furiously militant—is the refusal to speak, to record the real, to describe. And it is a comfortable militancy, it must be said: practiced on a fellowship, from a tenured chair, ten thousand kilometers from the cell.
It is worth, moreover, putting some theory to the word, because agency has ended up sounding like jargon. Hannah Arendt defined action as the faculty of beginning something new: of man, she wrote, the unexpected can be expected; he is “able to perform what is infinitely improbable.” This is no concession granted to well-behaved peoples: it is the human condition itself. And James C. Scott documented that the dominated exercise it even when they cannot rise up: everyday resistance—evasion, deliberate foot-dragging, the hustle, the joke—is politics without permission, and the states that call themselves socialist know it as well as the rest. The Cuban has spent decades as a virtuoso of that repertoire. Whoever looks at him and sees no agency is not looking: he is handing down a verdict.
On July 11, 2021, the infinitely improbable occurred—no scenario-builder had it among the probable; it ceased to be improbable the day it happened—: tens of thousands of people, in nearly three hundred localities, with no leaders, no party, and no weapons, took to the streets. An 81-year-old woman summed it up in front of a cell phone better than any political scientist: “We have lived more than 60 years in lies and deceit, and this has to end. We are casting off the cloak of silence.” The State’s response was not deliberative: “The combat order has been given: revolutionaries, to the streets,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel said on national television. We already know what followed: the trials with disproportionate sentences and deliberate opacity, minors included; the only fatality of those days was a demonstrator killed at the hands of the police, in a case no one has tried.
July 11 left, as a gift, the promise of its return. And the promise did not wait for anniversaries. Since then protest has joined the everyday repertoire of Cuban life: pot-banging, street blockades, graffiti, demands outside institutions, student protests against the telecoms price hike; with peaks and plateaus, but never dying out, because it became, quite simply, the language of discontent. This June the scale rose again: the country turned into a blackout with pauses, communications crumbling to pieces, and people back in dozens of neighborhoods at once – almost always on the lightless nights; afterward, in broad daylight too – in what those who keep count already describe as the largest wave since July 11. The backdrop is a collapse no one bothers to disguise anymore: the new wave of U.S. sanctions stopped targeting individuals in order to ring-fence the entire military-business network that sustains the regime, and foreign hotel chains are bolting for the exits (the great friend Meliá has just dropped fifteen hotels, nearly half of those it managed on the island) that is burying the last economic project the regime had left. Amid that landscape, the people, on their own, keep proving that they decide, and that they know how to give their demands a face and a voice.
But restoring agency has a second half, less comfortable: the regime acts too. Cuban violence is not climate, nor structural fatality, nor “context”: it is systemic and has authors, orders, signatures. It even has round-numbered anniversaries: this year marks thirty years since the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes—which left four dead—and the man responsible, Raúl Castro, has just turned 95 with a formal indictment from the U.S. justice system hanging over him. And while abroad the imaginary war is debated, the administered war advances: and it is the beatings, and the nighttime arrests, and the hunger, and the blackouts, and the dead at sea, and the two-tier dollar economy, and the punitive imprisonment (more than twelve hundred political prisoners today, the highest figure on record). That war is not brought by the Americans. It has been waged, for sixty-seven years, by the Cuban State itself against its own population.
Let us also say what this column does not say, to spare hasty readers the trouble: recognizing the agency of Cubans equally undercuts the inverse shortcut, that of those who entrust the whole of change to Washington. We ought to learn something from watching the very movement that returned Trump to the White House debate out loud, apropos of Iran, the limits of its interventionist vocation: the United States has interests, debates, and dynamics of its own that coincide only in part with the democracy Cubans want. To bet every last cent on that horse is another way – more likable, just as passive – of declaring oneself incapable. Agency cannot be outsourced: neither to deny it nor to exercise it.
And what does that left – not the left: that one – lose when, able to choose, it chooses the villager’s script? It loses the only thing that defines it. For what defines a left, beyond the calling to justice and the utopia of a dignified life for all, if not the decision never to side with the oppressor? When the Cuban streets filled, much of the continental left – with honorable exceptions – did not rise for Cuba as it had risen for Chile; it did not accept that a popular insurrection expresses popular wisdom; it sided with the oppressor. The rest is familiar mechanics: the false equivalences that place on the same scale the repression of a totalitarian State and the “extremism” of those who denounce it; equidistance as a refuge; the watchdog that catalogues the excesses “on both sides” when only one side has prisons packed with political prisoners. No one here asks that tendency to stop being of the left; it is asked to decide what it will do with its words. What do they mean today, speaking of Cuba – the words revolution, people, sovereignty, freedom?
Protests across Cuba: The Pots Will Keep Clanging
There is, finally, a practical cost. In Venezuela the intervention stopped being hypothetical, and everything about that operation can be debated—its legality, its avowedly extractive motives, what comes afterward—except the sequence that preceded it. Decades of apathy, silence, or complicity before Maduro’s crimes did not avert the external imposition: they enabled it. The inaction of some ends up becoming the permission of others. Those who kept quiet did not spare the intervention; they spared themselves, merely, the moral authority to weigh in on it. And the contrast of January—Venezuelans celebrating in the streets of the world while militant indignation suddenly discovered the word “sovereignty”—ought to serve us as a mirror: the joy of a people is never in the global villager’s script. That is why it disconcerts him.
Václav Havel imagined a Prague greengrocer who one day, without heroism, stops hanging in his shop window the placard reading “Workers of the world, unite!” He overthrows nothing, founds no party: “he has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.” And because the entire system is made of lies, that minimal demonstration is the greatest danger: “when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked!’—when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game—everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.” The old woman of July 11 has almost certainly not read Havel, but she said it better. To cast off the cloak of silence and look the lie in the face: that is what the systems built upon it fear more than anything else.
And so this column asks no one to embrace any intervention. It asks something prior, cheaper, more basic, and more difficult: to stop lying about Cuba. To name the war that does exist, and those who wage it. To grant Cubans what the regime and its learned advocates deny them in chorus: that they are grown-ups, that they are tired, that they know exactly what they are doing when they go out, in the dark, with a cooking pot in hand. And to grant them in advance the right to the joy of the day after, the kind no panel discussion has ever managed to schedule. Peoples do not ask permission to be free. Nor will they apologize for rejoicing.
* This article was originally published in Spanish in Rialta Magazine.
