Cuba’s Fictitious Egalitarianism that Led to Mediocrity
In Cuba, equality didn’t just sweep away the privileges of money; it also erased the nuances of human interaction.
By Jose A. Adrian Torres (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – For years, the Cuban Revolution has provided an inexhaustible source of paradoxes. Some are comically endearing. Others, unsettling. And a few, simply absurd. Among the latter, there’s one that intrigued me since my first visits in the 1990s: that peculiar form of “equality” that wasn’t based on mutual respect but on the symbolic erasure of all differences. An equality that didn’t seek justice but uniformity. An equality that didn’t elevate anyone but managed to bring everyone down.
On one of my trips to Havana, a scientist friend—well-trained academically, brilliant, clearheaded, but with a sharp sense of humor about social realities—told me a story that was almost folkloric, though tinged with tragedy. He worked at a “priority” research center—one of the few places where science was still carried out under reasonably decent, though precarious, conditions.
One ordinary morning, as he walked across a freshly mopped hallway, he heard a cleaning woman behind him shout:
“Hey, hey, compañero! Where do you think you’re going? Not this way! Use the side! Don’t dirty the floor!”
The tone was more reproachful than polite. And the word compañero—supposed to convey camaraderie—here served as a formula for forced leveling. It didn’t matter if you published in indexed journals or carried a bucket of bleach; here, everyone was the same. Or rather, no one could feel above anyone else, even if their role was different, their effort greater, or their responsibility weightier.
This is perhaps one of the great misunderstandings of egalitarian socialism: confusing equality with indistinction, and respect with identical treatment.
The revolutionary compañero, so omnipresent in official Cuban language, ended up hollowed out, used to flatten everything. It replaced “sir,” “doctor,” “engineer,” “licenciado”—even simple “usted”—with the intention of erasing inherited social hierarchies. But what it achieved was more unsettling: it erased distinctions where they should exist, without falling into classism or privilege.
The Erasure of the “I”
Alongside the omnipresent compañero, another subtle mechanism for erasing individuality was the elimination of the “I” in public speech. Expressing personal opinions was viewed as a sign of autosuficiencia (self-sufficiency)—a term loaded with suspicion in revolutionary orthodoxy, where the personal voice was supposed to dissolve into a sanitized “we”: we think, we consider.
Autosuficiencia became a cardinal sin in socialist Cuba, equated with arrogance and betrayal of the collective, thus reinforcing a culture of silence and fear of difference.
And so, compañero became the linguistic alibi of a society unwilling to see its own imbalances, hierarchies, or its real power pyramid (far removed from the supposed horizontal of “the people in revolution”). Let’s not kid ourselves: Cuba isn’t a society without elites. It’s a society with invisible, unacknowledged, often immovable elites. The problem isn’t that differences don’t exist—it’s that naming them makes you seem counterrevolutionary.
Consequences: Mediocrity as a Social Habit
This phenomenon goes beyond language. It has very practical consequences: for decades, a culture has been cultivated where recognizing others’ merit is suspect, demanding professionalism seems elitist, and asking for respect is confused with arrogance.
The result is an atmosphere of leveling from below, where talent isn’t rewarded, dedication gets diluted, and functional authority becomes resented.
This isn’t about defending titles or ranks for their own sake. It’s about remembering that a mature society distinguishes functions without humiliating, values efforts without paternalism, and recognizes knowledge without shame.
In Cuba, unfortunately, egalitarianism has morphed into a kind of liturgy of functional mediocrity, where obedience and ideological loyalty are applauded more than excellence.
So, while the scientist walks down the research center hallway and the cleaning lady scolds him as if he were trespassing into Fidel’s office, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Because this scene, which might seem minor, actually sums up a bigger tragedy: that of a society that wanted to level everything in the name of justice but ended up leveling everything out of fear.
From Compañero to Amigo: The Decline of Courtesy
But it didn’t end there. Over time, even compañero lost its value as a form of address. Then came amigo—more informal, less committed, lazier.
And so, from the cleaning lady invoking revolutionary equality, we moved to the shop clerk who won’t look you in the eye, the taxi driver who calls you hermano with apathy, or the young man who won’t greet you in the elevator.
Basic courtesy, the recognition of others, even the authority that comes with age, experience, or knowledge, blurred into a shapeless mass of fake familiarity and collective apathy.
Sometimes I think that in Cuba, equality didn’t just sweep away the privileges of money—it also erased the nuances of human interaction. That culture of “we’re all equal” ended up translating into “nobody needs to mind their manners,” and from there to vulgarity is just one step.
It’s as if courtesy were reactionary, respect, a bourgeois leftover, and greeting a stranger with good morning an unnecessary formality.
The Cult of the Shabby
And perhaps that’s why, as Silvio Rodríguez sang in those years of egalitarian mysticism, “houses without tablecloths” were praised as symbols of simplicity, of popular purity. But one wonders whether there wasn’t in that purity also a renunciation of care, an aestheticization of scarcity, a moralizing of shortage.
The problem wasn’t the tablecloth—which can be as dignified as it is revolutionary—but the conviction that any form of refinement or “good taste” was suspect, and that anything rising slightly above shared misery signaled ideological deviation.
This is how the Island, in the name of equality, ended up worshiping a shabby aesthetic, a morality of sloppiness, and a politics of “don’t think you’re better than anyone”—so effective that it almost prevented anyone from becoming anything at all.
Although, of course, many Cubans did succeed—sometimes privately, sometimes secretly—quietly defying the mandate of mediocrity.
Lessons for Elsewhere
One lesson from the Cuban experience is that when a government proclaims equality without appreciating equity or valuing real differences, the result isn’t lifting everyone up but leveling down into mediocrity.
In Spain, certain policies of today’s progressivism use the language of equality while promoting a fictitious diversity that only accepts differences aligning ideologically with its principles, dismissing or erasing those that challenge them.
This egalitarian drift shows up in various ways. On the one hand, in the devaluation of academically trained expertise compared to ideological activism and party loyalty, leading to political promotion not for preparation but for early fidelity.
Likewise, in taxation and regulations that, instead of rewarding autonomy or channeling resources toward the common good, penalize individual initiative, discourage innovation, and foster a climate of obedience, subsidies, and ideological allegiance where merit and excellence take a back seat to conformity.
In the name of supposedly just principles, merit is homogenized, résumés falsified, language degraded, and the potential of those who could contribute most to society is limited.
Equality Without Equity Leads to Uniform Poverty
This kind of egalitarianism isn’t inclusive but regressive: it denies legitimate differences not only of sex, gender, ideology, or origin but also—and above all—of talent, dedication, preparation, vocation, and even chance. Properly understood, equity recognizes all this and seeks to balance it without erasing it.
The Cuban experience shows that imposing equality without equity doesn’t produce justice but an impoverishing uniformity.
In Europe—and also in Latin America, where this discourse takes various ideological forms, from neo-Marxism (as in Colombia) to populism (as in Venezuela or El Salvador)—we should remember that true social justice doesn’t mean leveling everything but guaranteeing that legitimate differences can be expressed and recognized without being erased, disguised, or used as ideological props.
Only then will a mature democratic coexistence be possible—one based on responsibility, equity, and the necessary alternation of power.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.