Workers Atheism in Cuba

Yenisel Rodriguez Perez

Popular revolutions, such as the one that occurred in Cuba in 1959, create deep marks on people’s daily culture, impressions of all kinds.  Some foster future freedoms, others gestate oppressions to come.

Every revolution creates its own angels and demons.  These remain safeguarded by the people when the government loses the sacred path to the common good and social justice.

Here in homes we can find them present in the everyday world.  They accumulate energy to accommodate themselves to the disciplined post-revolutionary domains.

Workers atheism

One of the most terrible of those scars, left in adoption by the former 1959 revolution, was workers atheism.  It became the popular form of the previously official anti-religious ideology.  It was implemented starting in 1960 and remained in force until the early 1990s.

The government supported and ordered the death of all gods and all religions, while at the same time nurturing itself from the fundamental objective truths of science and reason.

A revolutionary people comply with the order

People attempted to eradicate the faith they carried inside and then eliminate that of their compatriots.  However, doing their atheistic duty, was disrupted by the deep-rooted Cuban religiousness. Thus began the complicity between the fulfilled duty and experienced duty.

The perseverance of individual religious faith protected the “love of the gods” from scientific catchphrases and reason.  However, the blind faith of individuals in political leaders incited the atheist exorcism of their neighbors.  Killing the religiosity of others ensured the concealment of their own individual beliefs.

It was an “all-against-all” situation that ended up damaging our politico-religious thought by opposing revolutionary ideals against religious ideals in a duel to the death.  Curiously, those who found themselves opposed to each other had subsisted united on the same side for a long time.

The revolution is dead

Now the times of a counter-offensive and revolutionary recasting are coming.  These tasks require the specification as to what to do with the marks of angels and demons that the last Cuban revolution left us.  We have to decide, for example, what to do with that worker atheism that survives in many of us even after the defeat of the official anti-religious ideology.  They no longer order us to kill gods or religions.

These marks are dangerous tumors that devour the spiritual core of the nation daily.

Unconscious Antichrists are murdering the mysteries of life to preserve state secrets.