Are Cuba’s Rapid Response Brigades Now Out of Date?
Anticlimax” July 11, 2021 – the blueprint is bankrupt
HAVANA TIMES – The largest anti-government protests since 1959 in Cuba took place on that day we now abbreviate as 11J (July 11, 2021). It was in the times of the pandemic. Demanding food, vaccines and freedom, indignant crowds in facemasks took over the streets in numerous Cuban localities, including the capital cities, leaving them ungoverned for several hours. The President, contemplating large simultaneous demonstrations over the Internet, broadcast over television the fateful words: “the order for combat has been given.”
They tried to restore “order” by adding civil party cadres and activists to the violent police repression playing out in full view on the streets. They won – a Pyrrhic victory. In a matter of hours, the police patrols reoccupied the areas. Within 2 -3 days, the street protests had apparently ceased. The police and judiciary blamed certain designated individuals. The tangible result totaled one demonstrator dead, some lukewarm palliative measures and hundreds of prisoners, some of whom remain so today.
On 11J, Diaz-Canel acquired the most derogatory nickname that any Cuban ruler has ever had. Calling some of those in the “opposite band” “mistaken revolutionaries” didn’t save him. While the indignation burned on social media, only a few representatives “of the culture” [meaning “political cadres”] backed the repression, causing them marginalization and disgrace among the public. Much more noteworthy voices polarized the internet against “the combat order.”
Before and shortly after 11J, the officials played at “continuity,” mobilizing adept civilians to short and violent performances against the dissidents or opposition. But they had lost their legitimacy. By getting involved in street clashes, the “leftist youth” suffered “spontaneous fission,” just like their comrades outside the country.
Old “leftist” friends found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades (which were never physical, but barricades of ideas separate more than stone barricades.). There were “leftists subjected to interrogations and “preventive” jail. The presumed climax of the repressive logic based on “acts of repudiation” were in fact an anticlimax. It was left clear that the official response to the “subversion” was led by police organs, with minimal allies. “Pandemic” solidarities also played their role. Weeks after 11J, Iramis Rosique, a young intellectual Fidel admirer of the most visible posted on his Facebook: “I repudiate the acts of repudiation (hate rallies).”
1980 – Mariel: childhood trauma
In Cuba, my generation was marked by the “acts of repudiation” that took place in 1980, during our childhood and adolescence. When a crowd eager to emigrate occupied the Peruvian Embassy, the Cuban leadership opened the port of Mariel, west of Havana, so that boats from the US could pick up those who wanted to leave. According to final estimates, some 125,000 people left, “sent off” with “acts of repudiation” by the “combative people,” and leaving us, 45 years later, with generational trauma and elusive memories on both sides of the Florida Straits.
In Havana and other territories, political cadres mobilized the “enraged people,” often from workplaces and schools. Faced with the imminent departure of someone via Mariel, the neighborhood staged performances of hatred and contempt: they threw tomatoes and eggs at their houses. Thanks to the “patronage” of the “socialist camp,” it was acceptable at the time to throw food as projectiles. In “acts of repudiation” and “combative marches,” they shouted: “Scum! Worms! Let them go! We don’t want them, we don’t need them! (quote from Fidel’s speech), or even: “May the Blacks who just ran / get grabbed up by the Klu Klux Klan” (a “witty” “spontaneous” couplet) – all while waving homemade posters with similar poetic phrases.
Walls and fences displayed graffiti with these and other phrases, adding “local color” to the area around the homes of these “stateless” emigrants. It didn’t matter to anyone if there were small children or adolescents or elderly people inside those besieged homes.
Singer Osvaldo Rodriguez and composer Jose Maria Vitier created the “hymn of the combatant people.” The latter’s melody – repeated in mobilizations even today, in this century, to the point of satiation – survived in Cuba far beyond the singer’s voice, since the blind vocalist emigrated to the US years after recording the song. This particular fragment of the words have always impressed me: “We thrust our spears into their lives,” as it spices up the already powerful and energetic martial rhythm with such a cannibalistic and phallic semantic.
I said “trauma,” because I know how much many others who once “repudiated” later regretted it (the majority? Thank God, I didn’t have any chances to participate or to refuse, since at the my then very young age I was very far away from that bed of coals.
August 4, 1994: Maleconazo
The Maleconazo was a massive protest in Central and Old Havana led by people who, like their predecessors in the 80s wanted to leave Cuba. During the 1990s post-Soviet special period crisis –eggs and tomatoes were out of reach. Crowds desperate to board some abducted or hijacked craft that would leave from Havana Bay occupied the coastal streets.
On that fatal August 4, they assaulted the recently inaugurated stores that sold merchandise in foreign currency that needy Cubans were lacking. They yelled anti-government slogans. The establishment then mobilized the construction workers from the Blas Roca contingent, armed with rebar and sticks, to quell the “mobs of stateless thugs.” Hand to hand combats broke out, leaving dozens injured. Only after Fidel appeared and addressed the Cuban people[SH2] did the disturbance end, although the Blas Roca Contingent remained camped in the plazas and parks of the general area for several days, sporadically chanting: “Throw yourselves in [to the sea]”!
“It was the people”
The organized dissidents had no apparent participation in the Maleconazo – it was an desperate eruption “from the depths of the boiling pot.”
However, the dissidents were the main target of the “acts of repudiation” in the final decade of the last century and the first two of the current one. These didn’t have the size or the intensity of 1980 or August 4, 1994, but followed the same logic and became the repressive pattern that was considered normalized at the local levels: a yelling fest of official slogans plus unpunished violence explicitly directed against unarmed civilians. The logic consisted in staging confrontations between “the enraged hard-working people” and the “counterrevolution” in order to avoid using uniformed police to repress discontents and dissidents, thus allowing the officials to keep their hands clean.
Uncovering the hidden mechanism behind the “repudiation”
I learned of Rapid Response Brigades in 1991, when I was a university student. My tutor left on his desk a paper form that said “I’m willing to be in the RRB, complete with his name and signature. I asked curiously about what that was, and he answered: “It’s for the acts of repudiation.” I didn’t know what these were either. He explained it. Since I admired his talent, friendship and outspokenness, I had conflicting feelings: signing the paper was hypocritical, but refusing to sign could cause him problems at work. We shelved the topic.
In 1993, they called up my university group for the rapid response brigades: we needed to sign a list. The students of the “University Student Federation Group, as opposed to the Cuban Communist Party spent two hours arguing why we didn’t want to sign. We almost won: the list didn’t get circulated. They had to convene two more meetings. The majority ended up signing, and I belonged to a proud minority. Even so, when I graduated, they gave me a spot in an “elite” institution where, when their hour came, they justified the creation of the RRB to “defend us if the people of the neighborhood next door should mob us.” It was precisely one of those neighborhoods that today we call “vulnerable”. By asking questions in those meetings, I learned that the Rapid Response Brigades:
1. Have no internal leadership, statutes, or rules;
2. They act exclusively on an ad hoc basis, obeying party leaders on the ground;
3. They are not registered with any state authority;
4. Are invisible to the law;
5. They are secret; you must not mention them (as in “Fighting Club”);
6. It is as if they did not exist;
7. Ergo, they are illegal.
The RRB are the armed wing (with sticks and stones, although I’ve heard talk of a Cuban Communist Party “warehouse full of handmade hexagonal shields, with the colors of July 26”. It’s their system that orders their creation and activation.
In Cuba, that system exploits, commands, and beats people (often via proxies).
“Unconditional support” and “revolutionary reaffirmation”: expensive under inflation
While the antagonisms between the System and the impoverished have reached the point of crisis, it’s difficult for a social majority that is atomized and focused on its survival to really participate in the RRB. Furthermore, if they gather people for whatever reason, they risk becoming a second version of Romania’s Ceausescu.
When Cuba was suffering similar inflation and shortages during the 1990s Special Period, my brother, a preteen who enjoyed the children’s night watches on the Day of the CDR (the official neighborhood organizations), decided to remain at home during the 1993 vigil. He never gave any reasons, but we found out that they were planning to go to a nearby Catholic Church to “respond” to “the priests” who had issued a “reactionary” Pastoral Letter.
Years ago, the CDR, under orders from the territorial party committees, operated like RRB in the communities. Nowadays, they don’t even have enough funds to celebrate “between neighbors,” their annual Party.
The socioeconomic factor has empowered the public moral discredit of the RRB and the “acts of repudiation.” Meanwhile new imponderables emerge as the result of the recent student strike over a telephone data rate increase.
The beginning, the crossroads—and the end?
Like many current and recent Cuban phenomena, the RRB is not a “communist invention.” One hundred fifty years ago, the Spaniards and the native city-dwellers who defended the colonial system, used similar methods against the independence movement. The extreme case was the quasi-mutiny of the pro-Spanish Havana Volunteer Corps, which led the colonial government to execute eight medical students, although a Spanish officer broke his sword in protest against such dishonor.
There have always been people like my father, who, despite being an admirer of Fidel, criticized not only the aggressive vulgarity of the “acts of repudiation,” but also their violently inhuman essence.
Although the tactic of violent repudiation has lost its appeal, leftist Cuban youth are turning to different forms of activism. The student strike and its confrontation with the government showed less violent approaches. Hopefully, after Cuba’s 150-year arc, this ethos will prevail.