Yasser Farres Delgado
HAVANA TIMES — Havana Times blogger Isbel Diaz’ recent experiences with Cuban State Security agents at the airport prompts me to introduce a concept that I believe describes current social oppression in Cuba precisely: coloniality. This concept appears to be absent from debates among “unconventional Cuban dissidents,” and I feel it can help drive home the need to overcome traditional dichotomies (such as Left/Right, socialism/capitalism) and envisage a future that is truly inclusive and just.
When I speak of “overcoming traditional dichotomies,” I do not mean looking for a Solomonic answer that would consist of a “middle road” between capitalism and socialism (as some social democrats often suggest), but rather conceiving a societal model that would break radically with both logics (and recycle parts of those systems, if necessary). This may sound like a utopian aspiration, but it is both necessary and feasible.
Isbel’s experiences demonstrate that the Cuban government’s crusade isn’t aimed exclusively at gusanos (government opponents), but at anyone who disagrees with the official discourse. Isbel has no ties to the anti-Castro Cuban-American community: he is an activist fighting for the rights of Cuba’s LGTB community, an ecologist and a libertarian socialist. When the international Left offers the Cuban government its blind, unconditional support, it is regrettably also supporting this type of oppression.
Coloniality As an Analytical Category
Cuba’s political situation is often described as a “dictatorship” or as “authoritarian.” These, however, are very limited terms that do not exhaust the complexity of social oppression as experienced on the island. The concept of coloniality can help us bring to light many subtle aspects of the kind oppression experienced under real socialism. I believe this is why a number of pro-government intellectuals have sought to discredit this concept.
Since the end of the 20th century, “coloniality” has become a fundamental category in many analyses of the process of domination and emancipation, in both Latin America and the world at large. It has allowed theorists to overcome many impasses within dependence theories and Marxism and revealed its potential as a tool for the construction of a future post-capitalist (and also post-Marxist) world order.
To grasp the concept’s potential, we must first note that “coloniality” is not the same thing as “colonialism.” As Puerto Rican theorist Nelson Maldonado Torres, following Anibal Quijano, points out,
“Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjetive relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performances, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of people, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day.”
Cuba’s official discourse commonly portrays the social process begun in 1959 as an emancipatory panacea. The revolution, it claims, put an end to class exploitation and to race and gender discrimination. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. What we find in Cuba, rather, is the continuation and updating of a series of power patterns that were established in the colonial era and which define what Walter Mignolo calls “the colonial power matrix.”
According to the official discourse, the history of Cuba describes an initial emancipation from the “European colonizer” and a subsequent emancipation from “American imperialism.” From this perspective, the socialist “New Man” represents a radical break with the two. However, if we outline the attributes of the colonizers, we find similarities with those colonized that remain hidden if we remain exclusively wedded to concepts such as “conquistador”, “imperialist” and “socialist.”
It would be impossible to exhaust the theoretical debate surrounding the concept of coloniality in a single post. The implications of the concept can be confirmed in practice in a rather straightforward manner. The central idea behind the concept, as Ramon Grosfoguel explains, is that a series of power relations suited to the colonizer’s hegemonic social model (white, Western, capitalist, military, Christian, patriarchal and heterosexual man) were established during the colonial period. The essential components of these relations continue to exist in modern republics, despite the fact these secured independence from their former colonial masters. This can be confirmed in many different ways in the “Americas”, including the United States and Canada.
Coloniality and Real Socialism
Cuba is no exception. The “New Man” ended up being an inheritor of these traditional power relations. In him we find male chauvinism, racism (institutionalized in various ways), Occidentalism (Santiago Castro Gomez and Ramon Grosfoguel have demonstrated the Eurocentric nature of Marxism-Leninism), a capitalist mentality (which persists in a conception of economic development centered on capital), militarism (through participation in the Cold War, etc.), Christian values (so-called “socialist morality” reproduces many elements of Catholic dogma and mirrors Catholicism in its rejection of any other ideology or world view), patriarchal patters (“State paternalism”, much maligned today, is only one of its expressions), as well as the phobia towards any sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.
Towards the Decolonization of Cuban Society
Cuban society will not achieve true social emancipation and decolonization without breaking with these power relations, which persist within capitalism and socialism alike. This will only be achieved if, on the one hand, individuals experience a transformation and begin to accept all forms of diversity and, on the other, if public and State institutions change and facilitate mutual recognition and plural forms of exchange.
The first condition depends entirely on our postures as subjects. The second is something the Cuban State does not offer us.
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