On Learned Helplessness in Cuba
HAVANA TIMES – It wasn’t long ago that I came across the concept of learned helplessness. I recognized myself in it immediately, and of course, that recognition didn’t bring me any joy—except for knowing that the first step in overcoming a challenge is identifying it. So, let’s take as good news the fact that I found it.
It’s that situation in which a person or an animal, after having tried everything to escape their reality, becomes convinced that they can’t. And worse—will never be able to. It’s when they begin to live in total abandonment. Falling into a sick obedience because everything feels exactly the same. The result, always negative regardless of any effort, won’t change anything. Goodbye, then, to self-esteem, hopes, dreams… and those expectations that once helped us live.
I shouldn’t find consolation—in fact, I resist it—in the saying “misery loves company.” Yet I have to admit its the truth. The country where I live suffers greatly from this helplessness. I see it in myself when I least expect it; I see it in others when I least want to. The simple fact of feeling humiliated and continuing to stay in the same place, with the same group, as if nothing had happened, shows me just how unwell I am.
When I complain to my family and neighbors about a blackout—because it drives me to desperation, it throws me off balance—and my neighbor responds, “don’t protest, you’re the one who gets hurt,” as if that darkness were only mine and not theirs, not everyone’s. When you walk past streets piled with garbage—already there, but now three times worse after a hurricane—and you hear comments around you like: “we’re in pretty good health, considering what we have to live with.” Note: there isn’t a single house without someone sick with one of the viruses going around, sometimes whole families, and in the neighborhood all anyone talks about are remedies to endure it.
Let’s not even mention the immense lines at the pharmacy to buy nerve medication. Or the horse tranquilizers, for example, that young people buy in parks and on street corners—probably just to feel, to experience something different. Or the very visible levels of alcoholism, because after so much time under constant tension, I don’t doubt it tricks you, convinces you that normal times don’t exist.
Those banks with no money, packed inside and out with pensioners trying to collect money that will only last them a few days. Why don’t we throw stones at their windows? Those workers, technicians, professionals… who head each morning to a workplace where they know they earn nothing more than a symbolic salary—one they’ve had since they began working—why do they go?
Same with students, in a country where it becomes clearer each day that there is no future (the numbers of those who decide to leave—not to go sightseeing, but with the intention of settling and dying somewhere else. Cases of learned helplessness—I truly see them constantly. Mainly in myself, and in others even when I don’t want to.
Through all this, life expresses itself in a thousand ways. And if it’s true that these experiences of helplessness, both personal and collective, are already studied by psychiatry and psychology, it’s also true that an awakening exists. That you can feel it too, subtly or not.
When news of protests reaches us from here and there, some spontaneous demonstration near or far, or the response of a president of a CDR (a mass organization: the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, membership required for working or studying in Cuba) refusing to collect dues and hand them to the Coordinator because she finds such collection disgraceful nowadays…
That is when I tell myself that not everything is lost. That there will be ways to overcome this helplessness, even though we’ve learned it over a lifetime and feel it in our blood. That there will be reasons not to continue that blind and bitter obedience. And surely, the strength will emerge to create free, conscious, responsible women and men, despite what hunger, fear, and oppression may have conditioned into them.
Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here on Havana Times.