Cuba’s Real Counterrevolutionaries
“They are on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba“
By Ariel Hidalgo (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – In a previous article, I stated that a revolution is a radical transformation of the structures of a society and that, therefore, there has been no revolution in Cuba for more than 50 years. Revolution was what was carried out during the first nine years by the leadership that took power in Cuba in 1959. So, why do those who govern continue to speak in the name of something that ceased to exist so long ago?
The question only has one answer and a very simple one: to hide, behind that word, what really began to exist in Cuba: a tyranny. As the economic model that emerged is dysfunctional – the older Castro himself confessed it shortly before he died: “it doesn’t even work for Cubans” – that leader did the only thing he did for the next fifty-odd years, every time the rope tightened around the neck, there were nothing more than reforms, a word that means “to change the form,” just to achieve a respite, but leaving the essence intact. Tyranny is still tyranny, and nothing has rescued the population from all its calamities.
But now very few believe in his reforms. It is about changing “everything” so as not to have to change anything, or at most, make fearful and insufficient concessions, as if trying to save the life of someone who is dying of dehydration with doses from a dropper and not with a bottle. Also, when they see that the dying person has any signs of recovery, they remove the drip as they have done many times. In other words, the reforms generally have a short term of life, because they have already fulfilled the objective they sought (to give some hope to calm people down, accompanying that, of course, with the usual mass exodus).
What, then, are those who are called “counterrevolutionaries”? If there is no revolution, there can be no counterrevolutionaries. If opponents are called that because they want to radically change the structures of that system that has become a tyranny, then, by definition, the true revolutionaries are those opponents, whether those who govern like it or not and those who oppose it like it or not. Do those opponents want to radically change that system or not? Well, that’s called a revolution.
Enough of deception and let’s speak the Spanish language correctly. Let’s not follow the game of those who disrupt the terms as a propaganda strategy. There are no counterrevolutionaries in Cuba, and if there are, they are on the Central Committee of the Communist Party and not behind prison bars, if we bear in mind that those who seized power in Cuba betrayed the ideals of that Revolution for which so many Cubans gave their blood. Not only for refusing to reinstate the 1940 Constitution and to hold free elections, but also for not satisfying the social demands of that Constitution, such as putting an end to the large estates and distributing the land among the peasants, since they neither eliminated the large estates nor distributed the land, but they converted the latifundios into state estates by having the State absorb 70% of the arable land.
Don’t let the opponents call you “counterrevolutionaries,” a term that was accompanied by another, “worms [gusanos],” an epithet that the Nazis foisted on the Jews. That’s where they took it from. It was the brainchild of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s shadowy propaganda chief.
On second thought, what’s wrong with a worm? Isn’t it a laborious little animal the creator of fine silk? The great Chinese sage of 2,400 years ago, Lao Tzu, said that when the worm believed that everything was already lost, trapped inert in the cocoon, it was when it was closest to reaching everything, because “what he called death, the world called butterfly.” The butterfly is the symbol of transfiguration, the symbol of freedom that we Cubans should put everywhere, because it represents the destiny of the new Cuba.
So while we might just as well reject that “worm” moniker, we might as well take them at their word, but instead of seeing it for what it is today, see it for what it will become and do what worms know how to do: break out of the cocoon and take flight in a wonderful winged world of many colors.