Jesus Adonis Martinez writes at the Institute for War & Peace Reporting:
Cuba Has a New Language of Dissent
The regime cannot counter the immediacy of radical but peaceful collective disobedience.
For 60 years, Cuba has lived under a totalitarian regime that violates the privacy of its citizens, maintaining a state of emergency over people’s memory and consciousness. It is a system that encourages citizens to spy, condemn and punish themselves and each other.
This week’s resignation of 90-year-old Raúl Castro as first secretary of the Communist Party, the most important position in the Cuban hierarchy, has stripped Cuba’s Revolution of its historic dynamism.
But things have not otherwise changed.
After Fidel Castro’s death, the symbolic capital of the charismatic leader dried up. To a certain extent, it marked the irrevocable collapse of a utopia, with all that is left of the “revolution” now the ubiquitous word.
Within the current government, the prevailing ideas are those of continued reformist economics and punitive legalism. There is an obsessive tendency to shore up the system’s structures.
The difference now is in the immediacy and the scope – potentially viral – of the opposition to the regime’s totalitarian power.
The technological shift of the internet–3G became available on the island at the end of 2018 – has not only favoured the emergence and relative influence of an independent media and artistic sector, but has also given way to a new syntax to express criticism, activism and political dissidence.
The political parties, the official media, the repressive apparatus and judicial machinery of the authoritarian State are all too slow to effectively respond to this new immediacy.
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The irony is that Cubans may be beginning their freedom…
While we in the U.S are descending into the hell of Communism.