Despite having tapped all of the symbolic capital bequeathed him by the recently deceased Hugo Chávez, mobilized the State’s immense apparatus and budget and having a partial Electoral Council, Nicolás Maduro was not elected, as he had predicted, with 10 million votes. In fact, he didn’t even manage to satisfy my prediction, that he would win by 7 percentage points.
We got screwed over. The decision by the US government not to grant visas to Cuban activists and academics scheduled to speak at the conference of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) has condemned us to the sidelines – or at least to our own insular debates.
A few days ago I shared an evening with a young couple of compatriots to discuss the ideological colors of the island’s future. These friends were pessimistic about the chances of a socialist alternative being a solution to the problems in Cuba.
In recent days in the Cuban transnational press, there have appeared various analyses of the latest initiative of the Laboratorio Casa Cuba, a project sponsored by the editors of Espacio Laical [a publication of the Cuban Catholic Church], in the company of a group of young socialist intellectuals on the island.
The past weekend I learned about a public statement signed by several members of UNEAC sounding an alert about the need to combat violence against women. As an example of this detestable evil, the message referred to the case of writer Angel Santiesteban.
We owe the rise of Chavez and his movement for initiating the breakdown of neoliberal hegemony, which had produced obscene levels of inequality and social exclusion in the countries of Latin America. His legacy was also one of reintroducing forms of integration and solidarity.
A week ago, a shoe shiner in central Mexico recognized my accent and asked me, “Hey, are you Cuban?” After acknowledging that I was, he added, “Well then Cuban, this old man is more sensible than the other one… right?”
In my previous post I talked about smear campaigns and “acts of repudiation” orchestrated from Havana against critics of the Cuban “establishment.” However, there also exists a sector of the exile community — trapped by their anti-communist hatred — that magnifies their grudge and suspicion.
Whether their targets are dissident bloggers or socialist intellectuals, such behavior has a similar undertone: personal, moral and civic lynching. They amass what seems to be a perverse innovation of Cuban political culture: the internationalization of acts of repudiation.
A 58-year-old author from the poverty-stricken Havana neighborhood of Mantilla has just won Cuba’s National Literary Award. Leonardo Padura was awarded that distinction in a context of social and institutional transformations that are changing the face of the island. For many of his compatriots, these changes and the award constitute good news.