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Joven Cuba

At the Beggars Table

por Joven Cuba 1 marzo 2020
escrito por Joven Cuba

By René Fidel González García

With the title ‘Cubanidades’, the Argentinean political expert and philosopher Atilio Borón has published an article which intends to explain ‘what Cuba is and what the mystery of the rebellious island is’.

One may agree or not with many of his statements, made without much desire to seek depth and, in my opinion, with an intimate sense of admiration for the Cuba which has received him for years as a friend and a left-wing scholar. But the following immediately attracted my attention in the text, since it’s one of the ideas that remains editorially highlighted in its reproduction by the Cubadebate website, and because I was surprised to find it as part of the proposed explanation:

‘Cuba is a fine table with rice and black beans, fried green bananas, slices of pork, roast lamb, lobsters and fish stuffed with shrimp. There are tamales on the casserole and yucca with garlic sauce, pork cracklings and lemon too. And there are also soups that bring you back to life, delicious ice creams, incredibly sweet desserts and an elixir called coffee. Cuba is mojitos, piña coladas; and to round off the banquet and find delight without end there are exquisite rums and incomparable cigars, which are unique in the entire world.’

‘Is this a left-wing intellectual?’, a colleague has asked in the social networks. The worst part is that, indeed, as an intellectual he is left-wing, as is the Cuban medium which immediately replicated his text, or the professionals which will set out tomorrow to highlight other portions of the article and the sensibilities of those who may react to what can be seen as something halfway to being a credible idea within the coarse and fatuous promotional flyer of an improvised tour operator, or as an insult to the people which has built and upholds with sacrifice, patience and incredible everyday nobility the rest –and more– of what’s described in the article; but can never be seen as an argument to explain what Cuba is and what the mystery of its rebelliousness might be.

I don’t know either if they will give us a moralizing and stern speech early in the morning, or at noon, as it happens at times, or if they will keep quiet in their social media profiles, waiting for the next opportunity to demand the full weight of the Law falls on criminals, or on anyone left without a drop of power while they see that very Law being trampled and mocked once and again as in an atrocious spell, as an inexorable curse by those who do have power.

What I do know and frightens me isn’t the opinion of a scholar, ill-suited to our reality, yet coherent with the mirages caused by the formalities of protocol, or with the capacity of his own pocket. What alarms me is that there may exist –and ultimately become empowered among us– a new left, so obsessed and happy about the beauty of its things, that it can end up believing that we may mistake our poverty and prosperity –the Cuban qualities which may coexist in our struggles, failures and successes, in our dreams– with their vanities.

‘Welcome to the beauty!’, they seem to be saying without shame or humility to the hundreds of thousands of impoverished and lonely old people who can have lunch and dinner thanks to the protection guaranteed by the State, to the millions who anxiously stand in long lines for vile ground meat or rationed eggs, because that’s their fundamental and above all most democratic source of protein. For them, and for the majority, Cuba hasn’t been a ‘delight without end’, not before and not now, and that’s why our metaphorical David isn’t small.

If feel that, as a society, we are enthusiastically and flippantly entering –others may long be fully enjoying it already– a time of cynicism, in which reality would be conceived as a consumer product, so that those who cannot really escape it may get to do so.

We are in dire need that once again the heroes of good may rise from among us; the heroes of decency and honesty, those that the other Cuba, the one made up by the great people, encourages with the injustices that befall it, and when the small people are at their most arrogant.

We must take note of the dangerous ethical decline that’s taking place, of the political and social conservatism which now emerges connected to economic power, or with the hidden and shameful desire for power, in order to prosper and make rich through our misfortunes. We must understand the deep roots and the expansion of the culture, the values and the practices of that successful fringe, and of the way in which they have infiltrated our institutions and managed, for now, to corner ethics and civic responsibility.

Of that ethical decline, of those sustained exercises of opportunism and cowardice, profitable and exploited by them, we shall expect the worst evils. But we must never forget that the beggars table is also political, as dignity is virtue.

(Translated from the original)

1 marzo 2020 1 comentario 17 vistas
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The Left-wing Enemy

por Joven Cuba 29 febrero 2020
escrito por Joven Cuba

By Harold Cárdenas Lema

On March 5, 2019, Bernie Sanders was obliged to register as a member of the US Democratic Party, one of the many obstacles to his candidacy. On that same day, Fox News celebrated the attacks launched on him by Hillary Clinton’s team. And first thing in the morning, the official medium of the Communist Party of Cuba accused him of being an obedient pawn of his country’s power elites, who would usher an ‘imperialist social democracy’. Bernie managed something difficult: uniting against him the Republican, the Democratic and at least part of the Cuban establishment.

If anticommunism has defined the identity of the Cuban exiles, the struggle against the United States defines the history of the Revolution. Resorting to a common enemy as a means of achieving national unity is a usual feature of authoritarian regimes, but in the case of Cuba it’s also a reality. Six decades of sanctions and harassment explain the defensive mentality in the island. But recognizing an adversary is one thing, and the hysteria promoted by the advocates of official thought is a whole different one.

The ghost of Obama’s visit haunts Cuban ideologues. In March 2016, a black President arrived in the Caribbean island, younger than the local leaders, better at communicating, well-advised by his team, unafraid to refer to past mistakes, and accompanied by his family. As he left, there were strong reactions in the press to remind the people who the enemy was. The Ministry of Foreign Relations even highlighted the event on TV as an ‘assault’ on national values, while institutionally describing the visit as a success. If the moderate Obama challenged the stereotypical image of him that the Cuban State sold its people, the idea of a socialist President in the US must give them plenty of restless nights.

Radical ideologues find Trump more convenient than Bernie Sanders

Last year’s text in Granma –a must-read for whoever studies party media–, highlighted ‘signs’ indicating that Sanders aspired to become President of the United States. Maybe the first clue for the author was his 2016 candidacy, or that one month earlier American media announced his new campaign for 2020. It wasn’t exactly smoke signals. The text is authored by Luis Toledo Sande, who must be very sharp in his analysis to have access to a mass medium that’s beyond the reach of most Cubans specializing in international relations.

Bernie is not even close to the presidency. Most Democratic voters have yet to declare for their candidate, and Bernie himself is yet to battle Trump, but one year ago Granma denounced him and socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The newspaper of the ruling party in an island under US sanctions decided from the start of the presidential race to rant and rave against the most progressive candidate in that country. This could be difficult to understand, if there wasn’t an obvious intention to remind the Cuban people once again that the enemy is whoever ‘the ones who know’ decide, whether he is a socialist or not.

If the progressive miracle happens, and Sanders wins the presidency and improves the bilateral relations, the Cuban government would be tested. Proposed reforms should be implemented, social complaints should be heard and the country’s administrators should have to show efficiency. In practice, it’s more likely that they will devote that energy to denouncing siren calls, centrists with a sheepskin and members of the fifth column who try to confuse the innocent people. There will be a new campaign, with adjectives and labels to persecute the non-government actors who support the improvement of relations. They will dust off the Soviet literature against European social democracy and they will proclaim faith in the people while they limit their access to forbidden texts. It’s so predictable.

Nothing coming from the United States will pass the mandatory purity tests of the Party

There’s little mention in Cuba already of Fidel Castro’s speech where he announced that the destruction of socialism would come from within. There are no calls to criticism or to changes in mentality. All that didn’t end with Trump, but much earlier, when citizen’s participation was again interpreted as giving ammunition to the enemy.

Of course, Granma’s editors cannot be fooled by Sanders. Toledo Sande calls him Bernard, because, to him, shortening the name of a 78-year-old socialist Jew seems dangerous. As his text published by the Party reads: ‘Sanders will do what the leading figures of the empire allow him or order him to do. And he will probably feel satisfied with that.’ Maybe that’s why, on Sunday night, Bernie Sanders praised the Cuban educational system, and just last night the literacy campaign, comments which may cost him the Democratic candidacy. It must be a plot ordered by the leading figures of the empire. So far, Bernard is not the candidate that the Democratic establishment, the Republican establishment, or the most radical ideologues in Havana want, but he already leads. Yes, he probably feels quite satisfied.

Contact the author at: harold.cardenas@columbia.edu

(Translated from the original)

29 febrero 2020 0 comentario 15 vistas
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Those Silences Brought These Noises

por Joven Cuba 23 febrero 2020
escrito por Joven Cuba

By Giordan Rodríguez Milanés

‘Join us in this song which we may consider Cuba’s second national anthem’, singer-songwriter Adrían Berazaín asks the audience. Right at the chord where the string harmony flourishes, he intones with Mauricio Figueiral: ‘No te acuerdas, gentil Bayamesa / que tú fuiste mi sol refulgente…’ It’s the morning of April 10, 2019 at the Altar of the Motherland… ‘Y risueño, en tu lánguida frente, / blando beso imprimí con ardor…’ As part of a tour by Project Lucas, the singers look deeply moved, flanked by the bell and the fig tree, and with the Cuban flags majestically flapping in the wind: ‘Let’s all sing together…’

It’s La Demajagua, the place where the liberating Revolution began: ‘No recuerdas que un tiempo dichoso / me extasié con tu pura belleza…’ And the ‘Lucas’ people did very well to choose this place to start their national tour.

Perhaps César Martín, the affable historian of the site, only mutters the lyrics because his modesty won’t allow him to sing out loud: ‘Ven y asoma a tu reja sonriendo, / ven y escucha amorosa mi canto…’ Pablo Nogueras, the director of the Julio Antonio Mella high school in Manzanillo, timidly joins in: ‘Ven no duermas, acude a mi llanto / Pon alivio a mi negro dolor…’

The rest of the audience stays silent. Students from the high schools, the polytechnics, the medical school and the Manzanillo music school cannot sing along. Political and government officials can’t either. They obviously don’t know the lyrics. They most likely will answer promptly if you ask them about the latest hit by El Chacal or Maluma featuring Marc Anthony. Each one of them has recognized Cimafunk’s declaration of ‘Me voooooy, pa mi casa’, but they can’t sing what Adrián Berazaín wisely considers ‘our second national anthem’.

When the singers conclude their performance, one of the students whispers: ‘That’s the song from the movie Inocencia’, and it’s true. Caro, my daughter, comes home with her friends. She tells me the story. I ask for details: ‘I didn’t know the lyrics either, dad’, she says looking ashamed. I acknowledge my own shortcoming as a parent while I look on Facebook at flyer announcing a reggaeton singer’s concert, in combination with another singer, where the name of our city, Manzanillo, is spelled with an ‘S’. It seems obvious that our generation has been unable to captivate them with the significance that one of the song’s authors is Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the Father of the Nation; that the lyrics were written by poet José Fornaris and that, in time, in the middle of the redeeming wilderness, those verses would become a symbol of Cuban defiance.

And there you have Atilio Borón and Ignacio Ramonet in the Mesa Redonda program. They warn us about Google, Facebook and social media. They say that they appropriate our private information, that they study our cultural preferences. They say that the imperialists have a huge database which classifies our ideological and political stances. They say that they interfere in our intimacy. That’s all true; Gerhard Maletzke, Yuri Lotman, Teodoro Adorno and Noam Chomsky had already anticipated that. In any case, long before Google existed, the surveillance person in my CDR (the Cuban revolutionary neighborhood watch) was already reporting what time I got home, what books I read sitting in my balcony, how many shirts my mother hang out to dry in the sun, or the looks of any girlfriend or friend who came to visit me.

The problem of the former watchers is that, with the new technologies, they can’t help themselves being watched, and studied. Similarly, for those of us who used to decide which music young people could listen to and which they couldn’t, the dilemma is that we didn’t anticipate the day in which every young person would walk around with their own musical platform in the form of portable speakers or headphones, and with a smartphone to download what they wanted, according to their mood and their references, with nothing or nobody being able to help it. And since we didn’t educate them in diversity, now they’re easy prey for the algorithms Borón and Ramonet mention. While our media continued to try to impose the music they considered ‘correct’ or ‘harmless’ in terms of political criticism —thus the proliferation of reggaeton in Cuba right after political chants like ‘if you don’t jump you’re Yankee’—, social and media communication scholars, social psychologists and mathematicians paid by the Empire were creating algorithms to understand cultural preferences, classify them, customize them and subtly and effectively manipulate them. And so we remained immovable in Ortega y Gasset’s concept of the mass; inert in our desire to censor or standardize non-criticism. And so they learned to explore and know our individuality to use it in their favor; allowing anyone, from Calle 13 to Bad Bunny to say what they like. They’d figure out how to take advantage of that to inoculate their lifestyle.

And now it turns out our ‘mass’ can only clumsily connect, as if culturally colonized, with the most authentic values of Cuban music. They don’t know that without the son there’d be no salsa; that without rumba there’d be no reggaeton. They don’t know that the new folk song, in fact, was —is— rebellious and non-conformist. When they hear ‘Contigo en la distancia’ sung by Christina Aguilera, they mistakenly believe it’s a Mexican song.

That’s why, on April 10, 2019, when I learned that my daughter didn’t know the lyrics or the symbolic significance of ‘La Bayamesa’, I rushed out to the Etecsa connection point to download folk songs I consider emblematic and that were once even banned by revolutionary broadcasting. I begin with ‘Resumen de noticias’ by Silvio, and end up with ‘El loco del tranvía’ by William Vivanco, ‘Lucha tu yuca, taíno’ by Ray Fernández and ‘Extremistas nobles’ by Buena Fe and Frank Delgado, which were never officially forbidden, but every time I broadcast them I had to go to a small board meeting at Radio Granma to explain why I included them in my musical production. I remember the fateful afternoon in which, because of a debate on the web between Silvio and Pablo, the director of Radio Granma informed me about a certain mysterious communication, which banned the songs by Pablo Milanés! That was followed by my ‘You’ll have to fire me’ and his ‘Well, then I’ll fire you’. Fortunately, a ‘rectification’ arrived later in an email sent by UNEAC, which clarified that Pablo Milanés had not been banned. I could swear that the director scowled at me, I remember as I say to myself: ‘It’s never too late to begin’, and I hum: ‘y doblemos los dos la cabeza / moribundos de dicha y amor’.

(Translated from the original)

23 febrero 2020 0 comentario 12 vistas
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The Theory of the Last Push

por Joven Cuba 22 febrero 2020
escrito por Joven Cuba

By Harold Cárdenas Lema

One last opportunity, a plan that will solve everything, one last push. The Cuban exiles hold on to the hope that this time they will manage to change the prevailing political system in the island. Meanwhile, the Granma newspaper announces a legislative timetable which excites its readers. On both shores, there’s a long history of exaggerated optimism and promises with an expiration date, infallible thanks to the short-term memory of the people. J. R. R. Tolkien said that false hope is more dangerous than fear, that’s why it’s worth pointing it out.

When you want to believe in something, doing it over and over is easy. The patience of those who watch the NTV and Fox News is infinite. For that reason, they don’t question the promises Trump made in 2017 or that his results with Cuba are nothing more than propaganda aimed at securing votes. In the island, they don’t speak either about the current economic and social guidelines, whose observance should be media priority. Public attention has a teen spirit, always moving to the next topic in vogue.

That a political group creates an optimistic narrative to energize its followers is nothing new, but that its leaders believe it is. The Cuban government structure gets genuinely excited with the campaign of the moment. Meanwhile, exiles continue to build their identity around an anticommunism stuck in the Cold War, with a memory of Cuba frozen in time and frequent lack of empathy for their fellow compatriots.

Batista’s followers left Cuba thinking they’d be back home in a matter of days. They put their faith in Eisenhower’s trade restrictions, in Kennedy’s invasion and embargo, and so on with ten other presidents. When the socialist bloc crumbled, they took out their bags to return to Cuba, until they had to put them back in their closets. When Bush included the island in his axis of evil, they were perhaps more cautious, but the excitement was there. They day that Trump announced the return to a firm-hand policy, there were tears of emotion in Florida. John Bolton found it easy to go to Miami in 2018 and promise Latin American exiles that the troika of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba would soon collapse; the hard part would be delivering. After a year and a half, Maduro’s government has a stronger hold on power and street protests no longer affect Ortega. In Cuba there are shortages, but the people is far from rebelling, and the conservative sectors within the Party and the government are getting increasingly better positioned.

Ever since Cicero, all political discourses ask their followers one of two things: believing in something or doing something. Cuban exiles have tried both once and again, and still today they place their faith in the will of the current American president, instead of having a dialog with Havana. It’s not much different in the island.

The dreams of a prosperous sugar harvest, a poultry industry that never existed, an infallible energy system or a country of matchless culture, largely remained just dreams. The recent faith in a reform process, in the national debate that engendered the guidelines and in the normalization of relations with the empire were not reciprocated either. Some dreams were not fulfilled due to problems related to the country leadership, other because there were no conditions to do so, others because of external obstruction and even some others by chance. However, unthinkable goals such as the biotechnology development area or subsistence during the 90s crisis, became true. Perhaps the best kept promise has been the one of continuity.

There’s a reason why we always find a new plan: to keep the public interest alive in the cause being defended. In order to do that, it is necessary to excite the public with an objective that’s apparently at hand. Regardless of history proving otherwise, emotion is what matters in politics. The theory of the last push in Miami prolongs the conflict between both countries, and in Cuba it obstructs a long-term look at the island’s problems. When pathos replaces reason and false hopes become the currency, we must alert the public opinion. That’s also our last push.

(Translated from the original)

22 febrero 2020 1 comentario 12 vistas
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Speaking of Books

por Joven Cuba 16 febrero 2020
escrito por Joven Cuba

By Yassel A. Padrón Kunakbaeva

Now that we’re in the days of the Book Fair, and that it’s become a trend to speak about China and the coronavirus, I would like to recommend a science-fiction work which I believe to be among the most valuable that has appeared lately. I refer to The Three-Body Problem, by mainland Chinese writer Liu Cixin. Of course, as the reader might imagine, it’s not only about science-fiction: the work offers a very interesting approach to the contemporary history of China, its role in the world and what it may represent in the future of civilization.

The trilogy of novels that begins with The Three-Body Problem has been a total success, both in China and in the West. It won some of the most relevant awards, such as the Galawry Award and the prestigious Hugo Award. It impressed me because of the brilliant way in which it interweaves fiction with elements of reality, but above all because of the hints it shows about the Chinese cultural worldview. To make this point, I will have to comment on some parts of the novel, so: spoiler alert!

The fictional part, which gives the work its title, tells the story of a civilization in a distant planet with the terrible circumstance of being in a three-sun system. Because of a physical paradox, the trajectory and movement of the three solar bodies is impossible to predict, which makes the climate of the planet completely unpredictable and extreme on occasion. This extraterrestrial civilization, in order to survive, has had to adopt a completely authoritarian and totalitarian organization. Their greatest dream is to discover another planet in the universe which is inhabitable, and which doesn’t have the three-sun problem.

However, one doesn’t know this until the end of the first volume. The story begins in a completely different way to what we’re used to seeing in the genre: in the middle of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The historical novel component in the work is very well-rendered. Liu Cixin tells us about the travels of Ye Wenjie, a young astrophysicist trapped in the hell of political convulsion.

Ye Wenjie, after seeing the worst side of the Chinese political system, ends up in a secret military base thanks to her knowledge and skill. With the Cold War in full swing, the Chinese are worried that the Americans, or worse, the Soviets, may become the first to contact extraterrestrials. That’s why the Red Coast base keeps sending interstellar solidarity messages from the People’s Republic of China. Years later, the base would be closed, considered a delusion by the very people who built it. Nobody knows the truth: that Ye Wenjie contacted the Trisolarians and invited them to colonize Earth to stop the inherent madness of the human civilization.

I found several things striking in this novel. One of them was the representation of the Cultural Revolution. As a researcher into the history of Marxism, socialism and communism, I continue to view Maoism as something unusual. It’s hard, because at the time it was presented as the alternative, and it proposed to bring to practice some ideas I share, such as the cultural struggle against capitalism and the need for the cultural subject to remain mobilized and have active participation. In Mao’s China, there was even an acknowledgement of the existence of contradictions between the people and the bureaucracy. However, all those good ideas can also be corrupted and manipulated.

The novel shows in all its harshness the cruel madness of the Cultural Revolution: the bands of red guards deployed in the cities, armed young people who had the authority to create their own courts, judge and execute ‘the bourgeois’. It displays the spectacle of fratricidal struggles between those militias, once sectarian hatred surpassed the desire to hunt down a non-existent bourgeoisie, all that within a context of incessant references to the Great Helmsman. I was surprised by the fact that Liu Cixin was able to publish his book in China, given the totalitarian image of that country that we’re sold.

Something else you find striking when you read The Three-Body Problem: the Chinese historical conscience. All of a sudden, you find yourself in the certainty that that people has a history larger than your own, with many layers. For us, history has a path, the primitive community, Classic Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Modernity and Contemporaneity. China has lived through many more stages. They have different ones. Putting myself in their shoes, I felt as if they lived in a planet and civilization different from mine.

I gained a better understanding of why the Chinese perceive they are the center of the world. That’s why they called themselves the Middle Kingdom. For them, the period of colonial dependency on the West is the Century of Humiliation, a bitter period happily overcome thanks to Mao, which would be followed by a straight path to greatness.

Something invaluable for me was gaining access to a Chinese story about Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. We are much more familiar with Perestroika, but know little about the Chinese reforms. The Three-Body Problem shows some snapshots, all the more interesting because they portray how things were like inside that process from the point of view of everyday life.

In the book, it is shown how the arrival of Deng’s time felt like a return to normality. A Faustian time, filled with unprecedented plans and mobilizations, seasoned with political violence and totalitarianism, was followed by a time when the usual commercial flow returned, as well as family life and the tedium of the struggle for economic progress. It was relatively easy, almost like watching the sun rise.

China was a huge peasant country. Despite the incipient industrialization of the Maoist period, which Mao himself partly undermined, that nation gathered all the conditions to reestablish the farmers’ market. They didn’t undergo the phenomenon that, for different reasons, took place in the USSR and Cuba: an oversized urban population, a weak countryside, the need for a price-controlling state. In China, the state kept on controlling, but in a different manner; the commercial life was relatively easy to reconstruct. Additionally, it’s a country with millennia of cultural sedimentation. With a simple snap of the fingers, Chinese society and culture were rebalanced.

It was also interesting to see the treatment Liu Cixin gives to what we might call the dark side of the reform. The events of the Great Leap Forward and later the Cultural Revolution were so traumatic that, once the sense of normality was restored in Deng’s time, Chinese society tried to forget as much as it could. In the book, some characters ask themselves whether some things really happened, and they must answer themselves that they did, because there are traces left: a missing arm, the photo of a dead relative or a friend nobody ever heard of again.

The scene in which Ye Wenjie, now in Deng’s time, meets three former red guards is heartbreaking. There was nothing left of the time in which they were three merciless and fanatical teenagers. They were living ghosts. The reform in China was ruthless, it meant a terrible purge on all levels of the State and the Party, which entailed that former red guards, valuable during the Cultural Revolution, be taken to reeducation camps and forgotten in the middle of nowhere. When she sees them, Ye Wenjie is reasserted in her hatred for the human race.

Here I would like to give a small wink to those who defend swift reforms in Cuba. One of the reasons why the paradigm shift in the island moves so slowly is because it’s been attempted with the same people. In China they didn’t make that mistake. But have we thought of the human cost of doing here what the Chinese did? How many people who have devoted a lifetime of work to the Revolution would be left in total anomie?

The Three-Body Problem offers interesting points of view and insights about China. Above all it shows something we should have realized by now: that nation has civilizing project with its eye on the future, supported by its age-old history. Now that we’re amazed that China built a fully-equipped hospital to fight the coronavirus in ten days, or that they may maintain a 35-million-people quarantine, it would be good to have a look at the message of the book.

The Chinese Communist Party has a plan, not meant for tomorrow, but for one-hundred years or more: to turn China into a center for the accumulation of capital, to reinforce the shifting of global value chains towards the East, preferably towards themselves, to build an international financial architecture to match that of the West, and ultimately to supplant the West as the center of capitalism. All that to reinforce the central role of the Chinese civilization. They haven’t stated as much, but it’s what one can gather from their plans and actions.

That’s a challenge for everyone. Until now, China has been a source of balance in the world, in opposition to the excesses of American imperialism. But it’s worth asking what shapes a Chinese imperialism could assume. On the other hand, for Cuba the Chinese reform is a point of reference which proves the possibility of reconciling the plan and the market, although it’s an example that’s impossible to fully imitate, given the immense initial differences. Also, on a more pragmatic note, Cuba can make good use of the opportunities offered by having good relations with that power.

Well, I believe I ended up talking more about China than about Liu Cixin’s book. But I’m not going to tell you the whole story, right? I recommend finding the eBook. After all, digital reading is the new motto of our Book Fair.

Contact the author at: yasselpadron1@riseup.net

(Translated from the original)

16 febrero 2020 0 comentario 17 vistas
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The Three Burials of the Cuban Digital Sphere

por Joven Cuba 15 febrero 2020
escrito por Joven Cuba

By Harold Cárdenas Lema

A group of nerds created the Internet on the assumption that a connected world should have to be better. In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook would make the world ‘a more open place’ and Fidel Castro described the web as a ‘revolutionary instrument’. They were all wrong. Today the world isn’t better, social networks are a hostile environment and many Cubans there become radicalized in conservative stances. The use of the Internet as a political weapon is marking 2020. It began with a song by Silvio Rodríguez, a poem by Ray Fernández and a video by Eduardo del Llano, three scenes in which national dialog lost to political opportunism.

In december 2016, Edgar Welch went into a Washington D.C. pizza parlor with an assault rifle. The 29-year-old young man stormed the place to save the children that Hillary Clinton exploited in her child prostitution network. Not having found Democratic Party sex slaves, he was arrested, and acknowledged having been influenced by conspiracy theories in social media and in non-specialized opinion forums. The conservatives had activated a blindly trusting soldier.

There’s abundant literature about the use of social media as weapons of war. The book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media explains the methodology: to create a narrative, to provide it with emotion, to give it a touch of authenticity, to gather a community around that discourse and to flood the web. This operating manual describes the behavior of radical actors in our social media. From the new Cuban-American McCarthyism promoted by Otaola and the media that support him, to the fanaticism of some officials in Havana and their followers, the extremes are very similar to each other.

Both groups use you and discard you at their convenience

When Silvio Rodríguez criticized the use of a fragment of one of his songs and Orishas answered back, an opportunity for the tribes arose. The Granma newspaper, which never publishes the political comments made by the songwriter in his blog, saw fit then to come out in his defense. The Cuban-American right, forgetting their criticism of the hip-hop group for having participated in the Peace without Borders concert, came out to defend it from Silvio’s ‘attacks’. Social media then became flooded with analyses by users which stretched legality and the facts to arrive at results which satisfied their political preferences.

Two weeks ago, Ray Fernández shared a ten-line stanza in his Facebook profile criticizing those who smeared with blood the busts of the Cuban Apostle. As Clandestinos were already a symbol of the opposition, criticism of the musician wasn’t long in coming. The horror came when Fernández declared himself a communist; it was hard to understand how a nonconformist artist, who writes critical songs, could also be a communist. The right, which until recently imagined him a prodigal son, denounced him with attempts at digital bullying, and unsuccessfully tried to culturally cancel him. And the more viscerally he was criticized from one end, the more purposefully was he defended from the other. Cubadebate, which never talked about Ray’s greatest hit, ‘Lucha tu Yuca’, then devoted highly favorable articles to his declarations.

For a decade, Eduardo del Llano has been creating videos and films which question the national reality. He is described in his Wikipedia page as ‘a critic of the Cuban government’. When he made a video asking that the death of three girls due to a collapsing building in Havana not be used politically, debacle ensued. Media with an opposition agenda such as ADN Cuba, CiberCuba and Diario de Cuba soon changed the favorable tone they had so far used with the filmmaker. Possibly some party members who celebrated the video shared by del Llano thought he was a CIA agent until then.

Fortunately, there are also people who support or condemn following their conscience, not convenience

Behind the criticism of Silvio, Ray and Eduardo there’s more than an exercise of civic opinion. While economic sanctions to Cuba grow, funding for regime change flows into the hands of the media and figures of the opposition and Cuban exiles. It would be interesting to know how many of those who tear their hair for democracy in Cuba receive funds to influence national domestic policy, something the United States forbids in its territory. International law considers it illegal, and it’s unacceptable for any country under any political system. Having your pockets filled by the same person who chokes your people is an interesting show of patriotism. There’s people who jumped in the Trump wagon and like to pretend they go with Obama, or Martí.

In Florida there’s plenty of media and digital endeavors which are not journalism, but their political propaganda is good business. Some receiving federal funding to have an influence in Cuba and others competing to get in the game, they all feed off the morbid curiosity of an audience of expatriates who seek to channel their nostalgia and feels powerless about the situation in the island. The Cuban government, which for decades had a discriminatory policy towards its expatriates, handed them over to that industry of resentment which today politically radicalizes them with conservative values. This happens in the US with federal funds. One might ask whether it’s legal to politically activate a vulnerable sector of expatriates in favor of the Republican Party. I don’t think so.

There are several types of influencers in social media, some more responsible than others, but most with a tendency towards scandal and to shows which increase their audience. It shouldn’t surprise us either that Cubans go from political apathy to visceral right-wing criticism, sometimes with racist or totalitarian undertones, and with abundant misspellings. And if Trump has an audience for his show, Cuba has an audience for gossip and nastiness.

While government trolls (ciberclarias) are denounced and called names, the ones in the opposition operate freely and namelessly

There are signs that the Cuban government has created organized groups on the Internet to insert favorable digital narratives, and there’s evidence that media paid for by the American taxpayer, such as Martí Noticias, create false profiles on the web to distribute their content and create an image of popular support. While this digital war continues to escalate, the social media dynamic promotes the worst practices. Political analysts often have fewer followers than opinion merchants, and an expert’s analysis is not as read as a strident claim.

In the last month, the Cuban digital sphere had three chances to keep the short-term goals of its belligerent groups from imposing themselves. In each of them the dialog was dead from the beginning. Nobody recognized the hypocrisy of either assimilating or discarding three artists in dispute, or what that means for the building of the nation and the pending reconciliatory process. Social media in particular became toxic, from Twitter gangs to groups of friends on Facebook, all giving each other likes. Having the possibility of choosing our contacts confined us to a circle of like-minded people who reinforce our own beliefs. We live in a constant echo chamber, believing we represent the majority.

On October 29, 1969, an UCLA student, Charley Kline, tried to transmit the word ‘login’ to a computer in Stanford. After the letters ‘L’ and ‘O’, the system crashed. With this error and an incomplete message appeared ARPANET, which would later evolve into the Internet. Maybe we have to bury the dialog once and again until we find the formula for digital coexistence, but I very much fear that human interaction is more complex than technology. Charley Kline should have typed another word in his keyboard: love.

(Translated from the original)

15 febrero 2020 0 comentario 13 vistas
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The Logic of the Tribe

por Joven Cuba 9 febrero 2020
escrito por Joven Cuba

By Harold Cárdenas Lema

Cuba wanted to join the worldwide trends, and it’s managing it; but be careful what you wish for. In a country with authoritarian tradition, under external siege and historically immoderate, there are more than enough incentives for the citizens to become radicalized, as has happened elsewhere. In 2020, it’s no longer about some Cubans fallings short and others overdoing it, but about people who are breaking them up in tribes.

In July 1953, social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif took 22 children to a summer camp in Middle Grove. Their plan was to bring them together so they would create bonds, and then break them up in two groups to make them compete for a reward. The hypothesis was that there would come a point when they would turn against each other. Muzafer would then set a nearby grove on fire, thus creating a threat that would unite the group regardless of their differences. It didn’t work. In spite of the tricks applied to cause rifts between them, the kids would find a way to trust each other again. The initial bonds were too strong to be broken artificially.

The next year, they repeated the experiment at an Oklahoma state park, Robbers Cave. This time the two groups did not interact at the beginning, and they only met when they had to compete with each other for resources. It worked perfectly. Soon the groups were attacking one another and the park became the stage of an escalating confrontation. The final step towards reconciliation also worked. When their access to water was cut, they figured out that only by forming a human chain would they be able to move the rocks blocking the water valve, and they cooperated. Muzafer Sherif soon became famous, and the next year, curiously, William Golding published Lord of the Flies.

Half a century ago, the Robbers Cave experiment was an early sign about how easy it is to manipulate human nature and cause tribal behaviors in it.

We Cubans do not escape the human instinct of looking for a social group we can belong to; a search for identity which can be found in politics, religion or soccer. In a country where crisis shattered the paradigms of my parents’ generation, that search increased exponentially since the 90s, and it hasn’t ended yet. Churches multiplied, national values went into crisis, some party members walled themselves off, others on the left became worried, and the opposition grew with outside help. But this national and imperceptible search also made us freer today than we were 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

The dangerous thing about tribalism is that it corrodes the norms of political decency. There comes a time when everything that doesn’t suit your group becomes dispensable. Maybe that’s what happens in Cuba already. A Silvio Rodríguez song is only worth bringing up if it’s helpful for your agenda, a tragedy is perfect to make politics while donning a cloak of humanism, a setback or achievement in some other country is just a pretext to praise or criticize your own. It’s total myopia.

Defending an adversary who’s the victim of injustice is a rare act of integrity that will seldom be rewarded today when injustice comes your way. Then it’s time to see the one you helped not do much, look the other way or be glad of your misfortune, for it suits his cause. In soccer we applaud when a player stops and helps another from the opposing team, but when it comes to political preferences, there’s no fair play; Cuban opportunism prevails. Meanwhile, everyone believes they’re on the right side; no one admits being the villain.

Of course, in order to blindly pit two groups against one another, one needs to dehumanize the other. In the Cuban case, both sides have committed that sin. Epithets such as gusano (worm) and comunista have simplified thousands of personal stories and sorrows which cannot be quantified in a word, or even in a political position. Lack of obedience to the Party in Cuba is still as little tolerated as left-wing affiliation in Florida. The tribe doesn’t forgive or forget.

This antagonistic dynamic would be less frustrating if it wasn’t manufactured. There are individuals on both shores who seek such hostility, sometimes out of McCarthyist spirit and other times out of economic interest. This can present itself in the form of an official in Cuba resisting the necessary reforms, bragging about his zeal regarding the re-establishment of relations with the United States (and actually slowing them down) or encouraging others to persecute his compatriots for whatever reason. It can also be seen in Florida, where we still don’t know to what extent the funds for regime change in Cuba might be financing local actors who radicalize the Cuban community and promote bullying.

In April 2018, Gina Perry published her book The Lost Boys, in which the author interviews the children from the Robbers Cave experiment. Now as old people, they confess that none of them realized they were being manipulated. Sharp readers might think that a 21st century adult is a lot more skeptical than a child in the 50s, and they would possibly be wrong. You cannot compete with science, because unlike our finite lives, modern science is cumulative, and has perfected social psychology to unbelievable levels of subtlety. Today it’s easier than ever to manipulate individuals. And I don’t mean the Cuban State; it must be acknowledged that the group of decision-makers which might be tasked with such a thing in Cuba so far lacks the necessary sophistication to do so.

An area in which political tribalism has made extreme advances in the last few years is the digital public sphere. In keeping with an international phenomenon of political polarization, the social networks in Cuba become more toxic by the day, and digital media become sourer. This is joined by new phenomena: the search for digital prominence through raucousness, virtual celebrity and the use of the social networks as weapons of political warfare. The insertion of young Cuban professionals in other countries sometimes also requires initiations and shows of political loyalty to the new context, which are expressed in the form of more or less open opposition to the Cuban government. It doesn’t matter if they were gladly in the employment of the State, if they were indifferent about politics or if their current activism contrasts with their silence when they lived in the island. To fit in the Western world, you must belong to the critical choir.

Promoting hatred for the other is becoming more common, and an industry of everyday indignation with the adversary springs up, using the pretext of the day.

How can one break this cycle of political tribalism? Perhaps by looking for a shared narrative among the different groups. The resolution of the conflict between Cubans is not harder than it was in South Africa or Rwanda. If political preferences and different interests are the cause of discord, then culture, patriotism and the confluence of interests are the medicine. As long as some Cubans prioritize the imposition of their ideas over others instead of promoting common goals, building a complete nation will be hard.

In the search for a vaccine for the growing tribalism, we go back to the past. The initial theory of the Sherifs in their experiment was that context is everything. Competition or cooperation depend on which incentive is the greatest, and they were right, but their hypothesis was incomplete. The first experiment failed because it had an element which was eliminated in the second: empathy.

Maybe that’s the necessary antidote: putting oneself in someone else’s place and identifying how many small personal or fortuitous decisions would have taken us down different paths; trying to understand them, because no one has hegemony over sorrow in a conflict. And it’s about taking the first step of reconciliation, because what’s done for a common interest will never be a concession, but a solution to the problem. Empathy can overcome the logic of the tribe. Without it, there’s no socialist country, or democratic country, or whatever the reader aspires to.

(Translated from the original)

9 febrero 2020 0 comentario 19 vistas
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Uncomfortable Realities

por Joven Cuba 8 febrero 2020
escrito por Joven Cuba

By Alina B. López Hernández

I’ve been writing for La Joven Cuba blog for two years. Nearly all of my articles, except for some rare exceptions, are devoted to internal analyses about Cuba. There are too many international analysts among us. That’s on one hand. On the other, internal contradictions are the ones that determine the course of processes.

I flatly reject the idea that, in order to approach certain topics, I must carry out what we historians call comparative studies, and add a restriction which reminds that the same happens in other contexts; or worse, accept that we be asked —required— to show caution and restraint, since denouncing certain facts may give ‘ammunition to the enemy’ and discredit the image of a Cuba that marches down paths of dreamed-of ‘normality’.

The old demand emerges strongly every time something brings about uncomfortable criticism of the Cuban government and is spread with that added force that the Internet gives to information. I’m not naïve; I understand perfectly that everything that happens in Cuba is politicized. Our government also politicizes everything which, in other contexts, has the potential to show some superiority on this side.

The Cuban press —that is, those who run it— is greatly at fault for the advantage the social networks have today. For years we listened to the speeches of the leaders asking for a more critical press and a change of mentality. It was a stage in which Internet access was still scarce, and which could have been used, in the absence of troublesome competitors, for the modification of the outdated media paradigm, closely controlled by the Ideological Department of the Party and therefore slow, ineffective and lacking in transparency.

But they failed to take advantage of the interval, and now they must deal with a mediatization of daily life which happens in real time, on platforms where every citizen —well-intentioned or not, with expertise or without it, with ethics and civility or deprived of both— can compete with the media, and they do so with an advantage.

When some complain that the dramatic case of three Havana girls who died due to a collapsing balcony has been politicized, and they argue that the avalanche of pictures of run-down buildings circulating in the Internet plays along with the enemy, I wonder why they don’t focus on a deeper reading of what’s happening right in front of us, and of which this case is proof: the deep social differences that exist in Cuba regarding families, neighborhoods and skin color.

These inequalities are even more obvious in Havana, since it’s an overcrowded capital, but they are evident throughout the country, and they disagree with one of the accepted victories of the Revolution, for which generations of compatriots have made sacrifices.

The texts by Mónica Baró and Alexei Padilla are, in my opinion, the ones which have approached the topic with more depth and civility. She has long been devoted to the subject of vulnerable neighborhoods and communities in Havana, and she writes very deep and objective investigative journalism —something that’s virtually inexistent in our context—, in which she presents all the possible viewpoints and thus earns great credibility. Alexei, in his article for LJC, focused on the issue of the role of the law in this situation.

In another context, journalists would be offering information about how many parties responsible for the incident have been indicted, or at least about the progress of investigations. That would put the citizens at ease, and would make them less likely to search the Internet for the news they can’t find in Granma or the TV news bulletin, or that they would find online, but while having truthful, official information at their disposal.

Yet, let’s not deceive ourselves. There are too many culprits in this event. From the ones we all know: a Minister of Construction who must demand and control the list of buildings in imminent danger of collapsing so they may be demolished or propped up; the government of the capital, and specifically of Centro Habana, for the vulnerability of its residents; and the municipality’s delegates in the National Assembly, who hopefully live in it and not in others with better constructions. But there are other guilty parties, from the director and all the teachers of the elementary school across the street from the site of the disaster to each parent who didn’t do what needed doing: whether write a letter of protest or stage a walkout to stop sending their children to a place which, eventually, killed three of them.

Poverty in some Havana neighborhoods is already a matter of national security, and it’s ceased to be a social issue to become a political one, although, in truth, the economic and the social are always spheres of the political, whether the leaders like that or not.

Zuleica Romay, one of the voices who better deals with the topic of ethnicity and racism in Cuba —and from whom I learned a lot while editing her book Cepos de la memoria. Impronta de la esclavitud en el imaginario social cubano (Stocks of Memory. The Imprint of Slavery in the Cuban Social Imagination)—, develops, as a doctoral thesis, a sociological study about racial distribution in Havana neighborhoods. Hopefully she will finish it, and we’ll be able to have a precise idea, from science, of the magnitude of the inequality and its relation to the racial issue. However, there already are scientific questions we may ask without so much effort. Here’s one: what’s the relation between poverty in neighborhoods with a large black population and the obvious presence of people of that ethnicity in active opposition groups in Cuba? I know it’s an uncomfortable question. Reality always is.

The 15,000 apples sold at a market in Miramar and the swift discovery and public punishment of the offenders got more coverage in some media than three children who died across the street from their school. Such reactions discredit those platforms, which claim to defend Cuban socialism, when they apparently only defend the government. They protect the power, not the project.

Media actors in Cuba —professional or not, and whether from official or alternative platforms, including simple Facebook or Twitter users— should strive for greater depth when analyzing the serious problems we have. But in order to do that, it should be understood that the current fight —apparently for cultural issues, and having actors, symbols and songs at the center, sometimes tinged with rudeness, disrespect and shows of intolerance, egos and rivalries on both shores, ideological and geographical— is only managing to cover up the dramatic realities of Cuban life.

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci well said that, in times when the political horizon closes up, contradictions tend to emerge in the various manifestations of national culture. And that’s how we are, blind in the face of an apparent reality, which keeps us from moving past the anecdote, the specific case and the momentary situation in order to ask the questions that need asking. Here and now.

Contact the author at: alinabarbara65@gmail.com

(Translated from the original)

8 febrero 2020 3 comentarios 15 vistas
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