Dissident Cuban priest Alberto Reyes deconstructs the dictatorship’s reliance on mindless slogans

From our Bureau of Troublesome Priests

This priest is relentless. Every week he posts eloquent and brilliant critiques of Castro, Inc.’s 65-year-old dictatorship. In the post appended below he goes after Castro, Inc’s obscenely stupid slogans. Please pray for Father Alberto.

Loosely translated from Father Alberto’s Facebook page

I have been thinking about the power of slogans

Slogans are short phrases. They are made to motivate, to lift spirits and give strength when it is difficult to move forward, and also to illuminate in moments of darkness, so that we hold on to them when everything around us is uncertain and dark.

But as often happens, there is also another side, and slogans can be used to manipulate, to lead others where we want, giving them a force that makes them take a path without asking themselves if that is the path they want to follow.

Thus, from the beginning of what we call the “revolutionary process”, which in itself is a beautiful and motivating phrase, they have been regulating, manipulating and cutting our wings with pure slogans, of which I mention only a few.

They taught us to shout: “Pin, put out, down with the worms!”, so that we would channel our hatred and our already incipient frustration against those who, from the beginning, did not want to support this system. And many shouted, and denounced, and attacked the “worms” who abandoned the revolutionary paradise, before silently following them, from those days until today.

They repeated to us ad nauseum that we were the “Lighthouse and Guide of America,” while what the

Americas saw was prefabricated and false propaganda. But it is always beautiful to feel that one is a light for someone.

They indoctrinated us into believing that “The world is inexorably moving towards socialism,” and when communism fell resoundingly in Eastern Europe, shattering the myth, they displayed before our eyes a host of flags to try to convince us that the same would not happen here, because we, unlike the faint-hearted Europeans: “We are a heroic people,” “We are a fighting people,” where “Men die, but the Party is immortal,” where “Yes, we can,” where we

had to “Resist and win.”

All this in the midst of a succession of “special” periods caused by a continuous decline of the economy and a general deterioration that went from the facades of houses to the most emblematic industries, and that has ended up nesting in the soul of the people, robbing them of their joy and their will to live.

And faced with the experience of nothingness, of increasing scarcity and lack of solutions, the slogans returned, energetically, because instead of proposing a healing change, we had to “Do more with less”, “Go for more” and “Turn setbacks into victories” because, in fact “You can always do more”, in a Revolution that “does not abandon its children”, even if it makes your life miserable, causes your family to emigrate, warns you with threats that it will not tolerate a protest and represses the slightest attempt at questioning.

Time has passed through our land, with its slow and continuous pace, and it has seen us become poorer and sadder, it has seen us suffer in silence and shouting, but always to the obsessive rhythm of the commanding voices that ask us to continue walking “Until victory always.”