Cuba with Dialogue Not Insults, Is it possible?

By Benjamin Noria

HAVANA TIMES – When Critical Marxism classes were changed to Dogmatic Marxism, after 1976, dialogue was eliminated as a form of verbal interaction. In its place Cuba adopted the insult as a means of ideological support.

Many of humanity’s wars and conflicts derive, in part, by the lack of debate as a means of achieving peace. Understanding as a path to general well-being is often absent.

Freud said humans discovered life in society was more secure and powerful than living in isolation and in constant warfare. That was the moment when, perhaps, man devised the social contract.

I don’t suspect that dialogue was present in that process. However, Cubans have rejected the benefits of that human ability and made it taboo.

Dialogue allows us to talk about things we like and the things we don’t like. In preventing people from talking about what they don’t like is where insult enters the scene in Cuba.

The insult to prevent dialogue

It’s useless to talk with Cubans about issues of freedom of expression or other types of freedoms. I remember going into a pharmacy two months ago and hearing a woman express: “There are never medicines here.” Immediately, the pharmacy workers responded to the lady. “You are ungrateful, because the Revolution has given you everything, you worm.”

Many Cubans don’t see as important hearing the bad things that affect their well-being. What interests them is to destroy the originality and intelligence of the person criticizing, to wish them misery.

The insult is a significant instrument in this activity. Many of us, at one time, have been guilty of being carried away by the passion and blindness of ideology. That is why we haven’t improved our economic life, which worsens with offenses.

Lenin said that economics was the concentrated expression of politics. There is no effective policy with insults and hatred. Politics and education should foment a culture of exchange, of debate.  A Cuban thinker once wrote that a cultural and moral change is needed before all political and economic change.

There are no changes without a culture of dialogue. The transformation we need must be accompanied by debate without exclusions. A dialogue that permeates the mind with creativity and fills our lives with diversity.

It can even solve the problems of homophobia that still overwhelm us here in the 21st century. We could have resolved them like in European countries if we weren’t so culturally backward.

The culture of each country has all the merit that it conquers through understanding, not aggressiveness. The insults in Cuba have left us many victims and mental poverty. All of us Cubans should contribute to eradicate insults from our daily lives.

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