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twitter

Democracy in the Time of Twitter

por Consejo Editorial 27 septiembre 2020
escrito por Consejo Editorial

The term ‘trench dynamic’ has been used repeatedly to refer to a type of exchange occurring on online social media (OSM) regarding the Cuban political issue, and which has received particular attention from traditional media in the last few months. Indeed, the OSM users who discuss Cuba inhabit a very polarized environment; we move in echo chambers that promote the reaffirmation of increasingly irreconcilable stances, equally digging deeper into the trenches of McCarthyism and orthodox Leninism.

However, the phenomenon is far from being uniquely Cuban. In the last few years, a growing number of researches have cropped up in high-impact scientific journals, trying to decipher the deep keys of the emergence and consolidation of OSM tribes and bubbles, especially those related to polarizing topics. It’s a flourishing and complex corpus of studies, in which epistemological approaches as distant as cognitive psychology and statistical physics are applied.

And it happens that, beyond academic interest, polarization exacerbated with the help of Twitter, Facebook or Telegram begins to threaten the very stability of liberal democracies, obstructing the generation of wide consensus that would allow progress in society. In the last decade, OSM went from being alternative media for electoral propaganda to becoming the preferred stage for political information and debate. In parallel, the model of capitalist political representation entered a crisis that is externally visible in specific macroscopic splits such as the ones embodied by Brexit, Trump, or Bolsonaro, but which is much more general and contains a significant institutional (structural) dimension.

Political representation is a concept in constant evolution. It is affected by social changes is nothing new. In fact, echo chambers aren’t always uncritical environments for the simple repetition of messages; and they are certainly not a product of the internet. In a way, an echo chamber is precisely what a political party ideally generates in its members: a sort of think tank at the base. The problem is that OSM, unlike the traditional social networks, is largely a self-organizing system, where it’s often difficult for the elites to maintain control over discourses, and where extreme stances are inevitably reinforced by the unprecedented range and mass dissemination of interactions. With OSM we’re getting closer and closer to people who think exactly like us and feeling less and less the obligation to interact cordially with those who think differently: the perfect cocktail for extremism.

Maybe we shouldn’t worry ourselves too much with liberal democracy.

If there’s something capitalism deserves credit for, it’s precisely for its tested resiliency. And one would still have to remember that the democratic element in capitalism is neither essential nor foundational, but an expression of that resiliency configured to smoothen the rough elements of representation. The original form in which France and the US conceived themselves was that of a republic with the representative government; and one speaks of suffrage and representation as support for the anti-monarchist platform, but the term democracy does not appear in any of their foundational documents.

That eternal and dangerous struggle of power-in-the-representatives versus power-in-the-citizens, which wasn’t immediately resolved with the political revolutions of the 18th century, finally found a détente in the bourgeois form of partisan democracy. Today, it’s well established for many academics that the model of liberal democracy only became possible when, after careful theoretical consensus, a system was designed in which the popular vote wouldn’t be dangerous for property or for the maintenance of society with class divisions. This point, far from being idle, has much practical importance, because it helps to dismantle the logic presently identifying democracy with ‘liberal democracy’, which is but a particular implementation of the concept.

There’s no doubt that liberal democracy has served as a means for the development and consolidation of a specific group of mostly first-generation human rights. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a design of democracy subordinated to the interests of a class, whose immediate agenda doesn’t include social justice or several other basic human rights. Therefore, from our perspective and perhaps also from a general anti-capitalist perspective, it’s much more interesting to think about the effect OSM and the technological revolution of communications are having on popular democracy, and specifically about their effect on the Cuban system of participatory democracy.

Popular democracy, which was born from the struggles of the working class in the first models of socialism, understood from the beginning that a political party system, which administers plurality with the approval of the bourgeois class, could only be consistent with the exploitation of the majority. After the brief yet intense experience of the Paris Commune, this democracy reappears with the foundational Russian model of all the power to the soviets, materializing the popular aspiration of a government emanating from the citizens. Thus, in a world that understood liberal democracy for what it is: an incomplete mechanism, associated with economic elites, and even when in practice the new mechanism of popular democracy would also become the instrument of an elite – this time a political-bureaucratic one –, the countries that advocated socialist revolutions gave a central value to the implementation of democracy, in the accepted consensus that it pure and simply meant true popular democracy. That’s why there was a recurrence of the terms democratic and/or popular in the names of most of the new socialist republics, whose focus on a number of human rights – typically second-generation ones – propelled the civic struggles for the rights of majorities worldwide.

When democracy was restored in revolutionary Cuba, it was restored in the form of popular democracy.

Thus, the socialist model of participation as a platform for the election of a legislative branch and the subsequent formation of the government was espoused. We have then inherited an electoral system that’s structurally anti-bourgeois, but at the same time implemented with the representation defects that accompanied the democratic practice of real socialism; namely, strict control by the communist party, especially in the mid and high levels of representation. Additionally, the context of the Cold War, extended into this day by the imperialist aggression against Cuba, has helped to maintain a series of largely anachronistic social obstacles for the exercise of the freedoms of speech, association, and others, which obstruct efficient democratic debate.

It is perhaps too early to venture a sufficiently fine analysis on the impact OSM will have on a model of democracy such as ours. By any reckoning, the most important element seems to be connected with facilitating new forms of expression, association and interaction through the internet. That is, not only the impact of its global scale but even the mere existence of these platforms outside the established institutional channels.

From the point of view of range and mass dissemination, the Cuban political debate now suffers from the same problems of polarization seen elsewhere. Moreover, Cuban society is now becoming inserted in a global agenda of topics that already was very polarized, and that contains many areas, often related to the rights and perspectives of minorities. Despite the emergence of discourses of hatred, this widening of active debate positively influences or is bound to influence the quality of Cuban democracy, thus resolving one of the weak points of the popular democratic conception: the visibility of minority groups.

The growing visibility on OSM of minorities and of the less fortunate sectors, in general, provides unprecedented strength for democratic debate in Cuba, energizing from the digital realm the traditional functions of associations, journalism, and the accountability of government officials. It may be that our democracy is not yet assimilating well this abrupt readjustment of tolerance codes, the fallibility of sources, and the relativity of self-validation mechanisms, but it should be able to do it perfectly, and the effect can already be seen in the influence the government itself has acknowledged a couple of times. There’s a negative influence on the pace of this assimilation from the role of illegitimately-financed actors, that is, with money for regime change. This happens not only because they generate an often artificial distortion of the debate, but also because they generate the constant need to identify and denounce these illegitimate sources, thus complicating the rational operation of the extensive Cuban mechanisms for the defense of sovereignty and state security.

This contribution by OSM to the Cuban democratic debate occurs in a rather top-down manner.

The better perception of minorities, the expression of citizens on topics of general interest, and the spirit of oversight of representatives have a direct influence on legislative and government structures, naturally with more strength on the mid and high levels. In that respect, there are already numerous efforts underway for the creation of digital systems and applications for oversight, open data, electronic government, etc, both from civil society and from state institutions, which beyond OSM are starting to make up the group of indispensable tools for the interaction of representatives with voters.

But there’s a second potential contribution, profoundly linked to the development of popular democracy, which consists of the implementation of systems devised in order to strengthen a bottom-up organization of citizens. This variant of digital interaction focused on the territory and community participation has been scarcely exploited by the regular internet actors and the great OSM developers beyond dating services and route and local interest mapping. However, at the center of this territorial conception lies a relatively new and dangerously tangential idea for the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy: democracy 2.0.

The idea of democracy 2.0 is based precisely on exploiting the power of integration of electoral actors by means of the internet, and it’s compatible with a territorial structure, with designs focused on the election. In a context of liberal democracy, the spirit of democracy 2.0 is doubly original. On one hand, it takes advantage of new communication technologies to organize debate and the expression of citizens, and on the other hand, it brings about active empowerment of electoral bases. This empowerment has its most obvious expression in the natural nomination of representatives, as opposed to the existence of representatives that are previously designated and are provided with pre-calculated discourses by a party. Thus, it is understandable that the conceptions of democracy 2.0 in the world are developing much more in a purely legislative direction, rather than towards mechanisms involving the election of representatives. At present, however, valuable attempts for practical implementation in both directions within the liberal system are starting to build up an experience. In order to see two examples, those interested may visit the French electoral platform La Primaire (https://laprimaire.org/) and the Brazilian application for interaction with the legislative branch Poder do Voto (http://www.poderdovoto.org/), both organized by civil society.

We must point out that this bottom-up approach, which is transgressive for the democratic system of real capitalism, has a very different reading from a system of popular democracy such as the Cuban one, where the essential elements of democracy 2.0 come smoothly and naturally into the electoral process, especially in the current mechanisms at the base, which have no contradiction in principle with the fundamentals of online strategies for the election of representatives. Contrary to most countries, the implementation of systems inspired by democracy 2.0 doesn’t change the essence of a democracy such as the Cuban one, and it could surely propel decisively the quality of our electoral process from the base.

The novelty brought by online social interaction in the discussion of opinions and viewpoints on a community level, the validation of actions, the feedback for proposals, and, above all, the wide spectrum of inclusion that can be achieved through its interactive component, goes way beyond the idea of democracy 2.0, although it would have a privileged connective function between the micro-scale and the macro-scale of popular democracy. In any case, the revolution of communications and OSM still has many things to say in the democratic exercise of society such as ours, and one of them is that there’s a lot of room at the bottom.

The community is a space avid for initiatives.

Would territorial initiatives bring with them the same evils of intolerance and hate typical of mass OSM into community debate? Maybe. Even for the micro-scale, this continues to be a problem in need of study and systematization. But there are many reasons to expect that in a local context people will end up being a lot more tolerant and inclusive. And the key is empathy. The fact of not only interacting in order to effectively change something but also to do so from a debate with people who are around you in a three-dimensional space, within a community in which attachments and coexistence compromises have developed in a personal manner. There’s ample evidence on the role of empathy in the generation of consensus through the emotional assessment of other people’s experiences and their importance for one’s own.

It would be a favorable success if the solution to the discourse of hatred and the polarization of the Cuban debate should precisely be in a participatory expansion into the micro-scale, supported by the popular democratic structures. It’s a reasonable hope; it has even been said that the hatred and intolerance problem in Cuba, beyond specific instances, is mostly posturing, because it’s something that the Cuban family has long resolved at home, where the most original component of what we are lies. How much help could OSM with neighborhood structures provide then?

The trench dynamic makes for a bloody, yet metaphorically adjusted image. There’s a fierce ongoing struggle on OSM, in blogs, and in any other forum for an opinion. But it’s more dangerous that we’re trying to improve this exchange following the same liberal logic of opposing sides as the only possible expression of democracy. It’s time to start thinking about the growing opportunities of the new communicational scenario, and connect the system of Cuban popular democracy with OSM, in debate models that empower the neighborhood and legitimize consensus and representatives from an honest exchange based on empathy.

In the First World War, when the trench dynamic (in the strict sense) reached the peak of brutality, the enemy lines were often so close that the soldiers on both sides could shout at each other. Sometimes, when they found a common language, they would begin by inquiring about football and weather news… Christmas truces are an impressive and significant episode of human history, in which soldiers who had been killing each other by the hundreds for many weeks spontaneously decided at some point to stop the war; none of them being any less German or British for it. Regrettable consequences are to be expected, a French commander wrote during the same war when the men become acquainted with their neighbors on the opposite side.

Contact the author at nep2n0@gmail.com

Translated from the original

27 septiembre 2020 0 comentario 466 vistas
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trump times

Living up to the Trump times

por Consejo Editorial 6 junio 2020
escrito por Consejo Editorial

These days, one learns every morning in social media about the latest outrageous words or actions by the politicians. It’s like the boundaries have been blurred between what used to be sensationalist press and real politics. There comes a time when one gets used to the crazy and stupid antics of Trump and Bolsonaro, to the trivial exchanges, and also to the excesses of the Cuban press and its ideologues. But the worst thing is that one sees how that boundless spectacle of human stupidity which parades around social media doesn’t foreshadow the end of humanity’s old problems: hunger, war, dehumanization, oppression. On the contrary, abuse of power seems to become the norm.

Donald Trump appears as the undisputed hero of the new era. He has brought about the rise to power of farcical spectacle, insolence and a constant yet honest brand of lying. Trump says to his followers: ‘I’m deceiving you, and you know it, and you like it.’ The huge mass of American conservative voters goes out and votes for him, as if to celebrate his lack of authenticity; deep down, they’re enjoying a form of feeling superior, that in which you renounce the feigning of superior values, and firmly declare that you don’t need them, because you already are better than the Mexicans, the blacks, the liberals and the communists.

Trump embodies the spirit of a time which dangerously approaches the reactionary abyss.

It’s no coincidence, therefore, that he would recently threaten to sign a decree aimed at limiting freedom of expression in social media. With his big bag full of fake news and post-truths, the imperial clown has rehashed an old dynamic of fascist movements: taking maximum advantage of the freedom of expression in bourgeois republics in crisis, so that later, once the fanatic base has been consolidated, they may crush the rights of the minorities. One important difference, however, would be that old fascisms at least pretended to maintain an appearance of seriousness, something which has been discarded in the postmodern version.

It’s true that party extremism has also begotten something like Decree 370 in Cuba. But one would expect that the leader of the free world not follow in the steps of a ‘dictatorship’ and proclaim a Decree 370 for the US. In fact, differences aside, both decrees are preposterous. In Trump’s case, it’s defended by someone who says he wants to protect freedom of expression, and immediately afterwards states that he would shut down Twitter if he could. In the Cuban case, it has two subsections which deny any revolutionary sense, but it doesn’t dare either to be truly Stalinist and dictatorial: it threatens those who violate orderliness with a fine.

What does it mean that in both Washington and Havana the drafters of decrees are supplanting comedians in their jobs? And what does it mean that jokes today accompany, or rather herald, the horrors? Among other things, it means that as a civilization we are in decadence, and that the stellar ideologues in the Cuban government have sadly learned to live up to the times. So, point for Hegel.

I’m not the first one to say it, but I’ll say it again: Cuban politics has degenerated on both sides to the level of a feud between reggaeton singers. Instead of arguments, we have the radical cheekiness of Otaola, or the idiocy of the articles by Lagarde, who doles out the label of mercenary as if it were bread by the rationing card.

The Trump effect is already in Cuba, with indigenous background and bad habits.

This reality puts all of us with an understanding of politics based on higher ideals in a tight spot, because it brings us to a question that haunts many in the world today: How can we be effective against someone like Trump? How do you fight against mediocrity and insolence when they are institutionalized? What can you do when people prefer baseness? How should we react when they view highly intellectual or moral discourses as false, bourgeois or alien?

The worst thing about these decadent discourses which are exalted today is that they connect with a part of the culture that remains rather present at the level of folklore and of people’s common sense. We’re still not as far as we’d like from the medieval villager, who enjoyed public executions and hurled rotten fruit at the prisoner in the rack. We’re still that in great measure. Social media have not made people worse, they’ve actually only brought to the surface the mediocrity which was already there.

Nevertheless, it’s a grave mistake to assume the position of the outraged, of the one who believes that old times were better, and wants to restore the political discourse to its old and respectable course. That’s the position of many conservatives, liberals and also socialists, who are today impotent when trying to face the phenomena of the Trump era. My recommendation: first realize that the old discursive models were always rather illusory; they were always functional only for a learned stratum of society, while leaving out the majority.

People are mediocre in great measure because they are the result of a system, the same system which granted usufruct of the word and of culture to a part of society. Therefore, that old republican, illustrated and liberal politics that some dream of cannot be the solution to the problem because it’s part of the problem. That old world begot this one. Expelling the idiots to the margins once again, leaving them without a voice, is an antidemocratic illusion, which has also become impossible to carry out in practice. What’s needed is popular education, a process which would allow people to overcome their vices and their worst impulses by themselves.

In this new time, one feels sorry for liberals.

When they try to ridicule Trump, to get him out of the game, they only manage to make their own image suffer, and they barely understand why. Trump may lose the election in November, but the phenomenon he stands for is only beginning, and it will repeat. The old republican and liberal arcadia that some pine for is crumbling down due to its own contradictions. The main one is because it was built on the foundations of capitalism, and as those foundations erode, it becomes impossible to sustain what was built on them.

This crisis of liberalism also has an impact on the Cuban problem. Firstly, it messes up the discourse according to which the Cuban system is a primitive ‘regime’, in which liberals have the historical mission of being its undertakers. It would be absurd to think that, at a time when the world is not heading in that direction, a by-the-book liberal democracy should triumph in Cuba. There are people –poor fellows– who dream of Spanish-style or Chile-style transitions. One only wonders what fuels their delusions.

The problem we have in Cuba is not the same that they have in the US, of course. In our island, the liberal order that Batista brought to a crisis not only failed to be restored, it was swept away. In that sense, we were ahead of our time. The problem is that, in the desire to move too fast, and because of bad influences, we discarded too many things from the old world and gave shape to our own kinds of horrors. Today we are in the painful process of realizing that some realities and ideas from the old world were not that negative or that easily surmountable: for example, the market, democracy and freedom of expression.

The bad thing is that, in the midst of this process of ours, when we should we refounding the principles of our socialist system and seeking the socialist way to manage the market, democracy and freedom of expression, the general decadence of civilization drags us along and pushes us too towards mediocrity. In times of revolution, many mistakes were made, and today those mistakes live and writhe as culture within each song of the worst reggaeton. The danger is that, in this universal decline of liberal ideals, socialist ideals should also be swept along, so that we’re no longer able to recognize the revolution in ourselves, and are left at the mercy of the more reactionary side of our society.

Socialism or barbarism.

The Cuban Trump lurks in the obtuse defenses of ETECSA made by Cubasí, in the public lynchings of the NTV for the amusement of the village, in the gangster behavior of cyber-fighters of the lowest ilk, in PostCuba, in the claptrap Granma publishes about the problem with meat in the US. Facing it is as complex as facing the other Trump. It’s easy to end up as a utopian, an ‘intellectual’, someone out of touch with what’s practical.

But Trump and his avatars must be resisted wherever they are. It can’t be done from a position of outraged morality, or from Platonic romanticism. Clownish stunts and baseness are not defeated that way. They are vanquished with the determined practice of authenticity. Nobody laughs at someone who is authentic, who does not pretend to be what they aren’t. It’s difficult, but it’s the only way.

Translated from the original

6 junio 2020 0 comentario 586 vistas
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realities

Uncomfortable realities

por Alina Bárbara López Hernández 8 febrero 2020
escrito por Alina Bárbara 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.

(Translated from the original)

8 febrero 2020 3 comentarios 433 vistas
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slogan

Analysis of a slogan

por Alina Bárbara López Hernández 6 octubre 2019
escrito por Alina Bárbara López Hernández

It has become a government slogan in the last few months. It was coined by the President of the Council of State and of the Council of Ministers and it is repeated today by every official or journalist tasked with making public statements. It usually comes out like this: ‘…as the President has wisely asked us to think as a country…’

In an unusual civic exercise, citizens have also been asked to voice their opinions about how to turn that phrase into a reality. Many do so in the social networks. For my part, I have given it a good measure of thought and this is my fragmented yet encompassing point of view in that regard.

 ‘Thinking as a country’

From Literature: Personification or prosopopoeia is a type of ontological metaphor and a stylistic figure consisting in the attribution of human qualities to an animal or inanimate object (whether concrete or abstract), which is made to speak, act or react as a person would.

Countries do not think. People are the ones who can think about the country that they wish or need. The function of personification as a literary resource is to be one of the figures used in fiction, but politics must challenge fiction and be realistic, otherwise it becomes demagogy, which is a political strategy that appeals, among other things, to the emotions and hopes of the public in order to garner popular support.

From Geography: In this sense, it’s reductionistic. The term country is a synonym of State and its group of political institutions having territory, population and sovereignty. The country, as the seat of the State, is a legal attainment of the nation, and the latter also includes the large number of migrants who, while not living in the country, identify Cuba as their Homeland, which means much more than an ideology, a political party and a government. It would be fairer and more inclusive then to say ‘thinking as a nation’.

From Philosophy: We’ve spent sixty years thinking what the country should be like. The first thirty years we did it under the symbol of the world socialist system; the last thirty years by experimenting unsuccessfully under the same condition of having a country-pillar to support us. Thinking has several synonyms: ponder, ruminate, contemplate, reflect; all of them communicate the idea of inaction, passiveness, stillness. Of course we must think, but we have now arrived at a time when there’s an urgent need to move on from thought to action, and that implies taking risks in decisions and changing obsolete structures. As Marx said in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, in which he criticizes the contemplative materialism of young Hegelians in all forms of philosophical idealism: ‘Philosophers have done nothing more than interpret the world in various fashions, but it’s about transforming it.’

From Sociology: It would be more appropriate to say express ourselves as a country. Thought is materialized though language. Thinking is not enough if we don’t manage to make our ideas, opinions and viewpoints known. And how can we do this? What happens with opinion polls in Cuba? The day after he explained the ‘present juncture’, President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced with satisfaction that opinion polls confirmed the support of the citizenry for the announced measures and the optimism of people. How can something so categorical be asserted with such promptness? How do our leaders know what we think? In an article I published some time ago I said about this:

Mass opinion polls, through surveys which respect anonymity, for the implementation and assessment of political decisions are a matter pending in Cuba. Having gone through the initial years of revolutionary effervescence, when few questioned the collective and massive way of approving government decisions in squares, parades and political rallies, we turned this course of action into a controversial way of legitimizing the resolutions of our government. In accordance with that practice, extended into stages such as the present one, in which consensus is no longer evident, we have lost the possibility of knowing the real opinions of people and their trends in percentages. We are thus failing to use the true assessor of government policy: the citizens.

In short, instead of appealing to the fanciful and empty slogan of thinking as a country, conditions should be created to enable Cubans to act as part of the nation, and to enable our government to visualize and respect our needs and opinions, so it may thus rule by obeying.

(Translated from the original)

6 octubre 2019 0 comentario 585 vistas
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expected

What’s expected of a president

por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés 21 septiembre 2019
escrito por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés

There are no photos. I maintain it was a fact. The plain and simple fact that the President of Cuba pulled over at a bus stop very early in the morning and allowed as many people as he could to hitch a ride in his motorcade.

I wasn’t there; all I have is the testimony of several Internet users. One of them assures me that somebody told him it was all staged, and that those who got on the cars were personal security staff previously taken to the P1 bus stop. I have the story of a couple of former schoolmates, who are so committed to the opposition that they fear they could lose the trust of their employers by telling me they saw something inconsistent with their discrediting views of Cubans and their leaders.

Nearly eight months ago there was a video alright. But there was no fact. Or the fact was misrepresented and it went viral. Tons of bytes were written with all sorts of theories and arguments about the rejection of the President in Regla. I was there, not by chance, but because I had gone there to help. Based on that, and not on anyone’s account colored by their doctrines or uncritical attitudes, I can say there was a video in which the President apparently fled. But there was no fact, nor such flight.

Honest and coherent people expect to find that same coherence in others, and they place their belief in the honesty of others. Acknowledging that a people can be –and indeed is– imperfect, sometimes clumsy, and prone to extremes and fanaticism, should not drive us to impiety or lack of faith in those around us. A faithless people is not a wise people; it’s just an unhealthy gathering.

Imperialist ambition is, in my opinion, the biggest issue, the begetter of the whole assortment of problems we Cubans have. Since I would have to write a treatise in order to demonstrate such a proposition, I don’t even go to all the trouble of refuting the views of those who, in all their right, believe the opposite. I believe in that through faith, and faith is not debated in the realms of philosophy or science.

You either believe in something, or you don’t.

And I believe that the number one goal of right-wing ideology in Cuba is to deprive us of any spiritual refuge. It’s not only about tracking down financial transactions, or fining banks that grant us credit, or penalizing shipping companies that transport our fuel, while, at the same time, allowing their companies to sell us food we have to pay for cash down so that their soldiers of hate may shout on the web ‘What blockade?’. Meanwhile, hundreds of small entrepreneurs see their businesses affected by the travel ban on cruise ships, or the pediatrician of a hospital in Manzanillo has to decide which patient gets the last dose of Octanate left in stock.

It is the task of the right wing in Cuba to make us morbidly question each other and distrust the honesty of those next to us. They seek that, when we look in the mirror, we see ourselves incoherent and absurd, without hopes or dreams, with friends becoming foes and foes disguised as friends.

I also have faith that, if there was a Christ who multiplied the loaves and the fishes, and an Antonio Maceo who put his rice and chicken in the cauldron where the soup for his soldiers was stewing, and a Silvio Rodríguez who sings for the poor of this earth in their neighborhoods, there can be a Díaz-Canel who stops the presidential motorcade to pick up a few of his compatriots. Even though we know a lot more is expected from the President of a country. It’s even expected that he and his government staff may avoid the worsening of our already injurious crisis.

There’s belief in him when maintaining that the exclusion of diverse thought can only stir even further the hatred among Cubans. There’s support for the President when he is asked to request the resignation of a deputy minister who is clumsy at political communication. He is asked to give a response to Dr. René Fidel and force the Attorney-General of the Republic’s office to deal with the fair complaints of this citizen. The President is asked every day that he make institutions serve all Cubans equally, whatever their views and whatever their pronouncements.

While faith is necessary for the health of peoples, fanaticism and extremism, spitefulness and hatred, and catharses that prey on collectivity and solidarity, kill us as a nation. The only things to be defended at any price in life should be love for our neighbor and respect for those who practice it. That’s why, among others, I respect Christ, Antonio Maceo and –I now add– Díaz-Canel. And I do not forget that the latter still keeps me waiting for his answers. I don’t need photos of what happened at that P1 bus stop. That’s what’s expected of a President.

(Translated from the original)

21 septiembre 2019 0 comentario 477 vistas
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Ayúdanos a ser sostenibles

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La Joven Cuba es un equipo de investigación y análisis político que trabaja por un país justo, democrático y sostenible. Con una plataforma digital y un equipo especializado en el análisis de la realidad cubana, aspiramos a ser punto de enlace entre la sociedad civil y los decisores, mediante la investigación y la generación de conocimiento sobre la aplicación de políticas públicas.

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