Cuba’s 65-year-long experiment with socialism has been one of disastrous failures and brutal oppression. The results show that no matter how anyone tries to spin it, communism is pure evil.
Rolando Alum and Jorge Sanguinetty explain in CubaNet (my translation):
The future of a Cuban past: An evil experiment
Cuba’s unfortunate recent history and its failed current outcome also serve as a preventive model for other nations.
Since its inception, the Cuban regime has had a chorus of Orwellian apologists in academic and journalistic circles, albeit comfortably from abroad: none of them would reside in socialist Cuba since, hypocritically, they require freedoms for themselves. Nevertheless, they continue to preach fraudulent myths — akin to propaganda slogans — about the supposed achievements of the Cuban government. Let’s start by exposing that socialist Cuba represents a collection of 65 years of anomalies, worsening over time. The current crisis, rather enduring (financial, sociopolitical, food, energy, hygiene, public health, etc.), is rapidly worsening.
The privileged few who believe they are the government, because they virtually hold Cubans — of all generations and ethnic origins — hostage, seem to not know how to escape it, except to insist on perpetuating themselves in power and continuing to transmit their fantasies to the rest of the world, while insulting anyone (national or foreign) who dares to differ from the official line. Indeed, it is a true Gordian knot that no one can, or dares to, cut, while the population trapped there inexorably marches towards the prolongation of a nightmarish Dantean ordeal, so ignoble that it is difficult to describe. We wonder how we arrived at this crossroads.
Despite the tons of ink spilled in writings about contemporary Cuba, the Social Sciences — working separately each in their own right — do not seem to have satisfactory answers, although perhaps readers can assist us with their own observations in our attempt at analysis; we welcome all constructive comments.
Studies in the field of Economics, for example, identify several key problems but do not solve them for psychological or political reasons; the “anthropological damage” pointed out by the respected Cuban dissident Dagoberto Valdés is difficult to measure. The multi-social phenomenon manifested in the Antillean country under the label of “revolution” has transformed into something monstrous that traps the country, apart from (or despite) the cost of so many sacrificed lives. This phenomenon, which threatens the existence of Cuban identity with its own disappearance, must be analyzed with a new strategy, a different brave epistemological approach.
The story of Phineas Gage could be instructive for the Cuban case. Gage was an American railroad worker who suffered an accident in 1848 when an iron rod partially destroyed his frontal brain lobe. Ironically, it was thanks to this horrific work accident — from which he survived — that medical sciences could expand knowledge about the human brain.
The Philosophy of Science reminds us that the Social Sciences are even less experimental. For example, we cannot impose as an experiment a fascist dictatorship in one nation and a Marxist one in another to contrast their results in our fictitious sociopolitical laboratory experiment. However, we have heard from certain academics — comfortably settled abroad (including some born in Cuba and even located in Miami) — that they still shamefully refer to the Cuban phenomenon at this stage as a “valuable revolutionary experiment.” But perhaps a parallel with Gage’s accident is more accurate.
Suppose Castroism has been the equivalent of the rod that pierced Gage’s skull, a terrifyingly malignant socio-political-economic rod (though disguised as benevolent “humanism”) that pierces through an entire languishing society. Like the human nervous system, societies are not conducive to horrifying experiments (aside from professional ethical codes), and often rely on accidents to study certain phenomena. Thus, what has transpired in Cuba — which, again, we refuse to cite as a “revolution” proper — must be recognized under another label, in addition to serving as a source of knowledge in various scientific-social disciplines within the framework of Consilience proposed a few years ago by the renowned American scientist Edward Wilson.
The countless absurd decisions made by the leadership in Cuba since 1959 have had destructive consequences of all kinds that must be studied dispassionately from various disciplinary angles in combination. For example, viewed from the field of Economics, it is impossible to understand the role of ideology in the way economic policy decisions are made in Cuba without using elements from Social Psychology, Anthropology, and Political Science of tyrannies to understand the effects of Sovietization attempts, including elements of social control with psycho-social consequences previously unknown to the Cuban population.
Let’s mention just two archetypes of the most destructive “experiments” initiated by Fidel Castro: a) the so-called “Revolutionary Offensive” announced on March 13, 1968, an extreme measure aimed at eliminating all private economic activity as a step towards the disappearance of what he called monetary-mercantile relations. Its goal was to experiment with the disappearance of money as a medium of exchange; b) the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest which, although not achieved, negatively affected almost all Cuban socio-economic sectors due to the forced mobilization of the national workforce, to the detriment of other sectors.
The destructive effects of such measures and many others have resulted in the current crisis, despite millions of dollars in subsidies from the former Socialist Bloc for three solid decades and all the so-called “reforms” initiated more recently by Raúl Castro, the heir to the tropical throne, and those of his protégé in the monarchical succession, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Even as early as 1970, American anthropologist Douglas Butterworth discovered a “culture of poverty” created post-1959 during his research in a community on the outskirts of Havana, where ordinary Cubans openly complained about the regime, besides almost nothing functioning in the locality, not even the feared “surveillance committee” (see The People of Buena Ventura, 1977). Significantly, Butterworth labeled the era of his study as “post-revolutionary Cuba”.
The foreign academic and journalistic circles fail to recognize that the socialist dictatorship turned Cuba into an involuntary laboratory in the same way that Nazi Josef Mengele conducted horrifying experiments with humans in Hitler’s Germany. The knowledge thus generated by socio-economic-political accidents must be incorporated into evaluations based on the Social Sciences.
Contrary to what shamelessly touted defenders of the disputable Cuban regime proclaim, we estimate that Cuba’s recent unfortunate history and its failed current outcome also serve as a preventive model for other nations. That may be one of the main real legacies of the incredible Cuban governmental storm.
It is a pity that Cubans are the victims, the guinea pigs — the Gages — and not the beneficiaries, although we trust that like Mr. Gage, Cuba miraculously survives the lamentable socialist accident.