Cuba’s Command & Control Model
Spontaneity or Independence are ruled out
By Benjamin Noria
HAVANA TIMES – Very few people know that everything people see in Cuba first passes through the Communist Party’s Ideological Department’s filter. Nothing is shown or published without first being analyzed or getting the green light from this body.
For example, many people praise Panfilo’s spontaneous criticism about the country on Cuban TV show: Vivir del Cuento. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Everything Panfilo says has already been checked over and censored by the Party before it is broadcast on national TV.
Furthermore, spontaneity and independence don’t exist in Cuba, only Command and Control.
Command and Control oversees everything in the country. No action is taken in the economy, education or health sector without the Communist Party’s judgement.
From selecting our movies to educational curriculum
The Cuban Communist Party (PCC) tells us which movies can and can’t be seen. Additionally, it tells us which subjects can and can’t be taught in schools. What’s more, the Party tells the Cuban people how to be happy and teaches them ways to be happy.
The PCC has become an alleged protector who is attentive and issues anti-capitalist slogans and devalues the market. For only the PCC knows what it is best for Cubans. It constantly targets our feelings, fears and attachments, and doesn’t reason and argue their point.
Cuban culture is forced and invasive. This is why there is no dialogue, argument or counter-argument. There aren’t debates, it’s just a monologue, as only one person is speaking and telling us how everything should be.
Cubans have even come to like being spoon fed everything. The PCC has freed them of the task of thinking for themselves. Besides there being little production, there is no creative freedom. There are no interesting, innovative and controversial inventions. The Dark Age in Medieval times is a thumb-sucking child next to the misinformation and restricted knowledge of Cuba’s Command and Control.
People acting like zombies
With every day that passes, Cuba becomes more and more mentally destitute. The Cuban people are like zombies. People lose interest in thinking. The spiritual alienation Cubans have is astounding. They have lost their dreams. Uncertainty has hijacked our dreams.
Command and Control created a long list of vices in Cuban culture. These include cue-taking, paternalism, schematism, authoritarianism, etc. People don’t have their own opinion about anything. Cubans speak using the same words they hear on TV. The TV tells you what is Good and Bad.
Command and Control is fossilized in both bureaucratic relations, as well as in personal and family relationships. There are Cuban households where young people are forced to sit in front of the TV to watch Mesa Redonda. Others are forced to read the newspaper at home. Russian cartoons take priority over Hollywood ones.
Russian and Chinese productions come before US and European ones.
The future of our country is looking very bleak, right now. A lot of changes will need to be made. They’ll need to be more powerful than the Perestroika and Glasnost of the former USSR in order to dismantle the Command and Control in Cuban minds.
The PCC condemns Cubans to a culture based on obedience, mental violence and subordination of the individual to the State.
Nothing offends Communism more than individual thought and action. As Dr. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara de La Serna Lynch so eloquently said:
“Youth must learn to act as a mass, to think as an individual is criminal.”