By José Ernesto Nováez on March 15, 2024 from Havana
Thinking about Cuba today is not equivalent to thinking about any other latitude. Cuba is a small Caribbean island that for 65 years has been trying to build an alternative economic, political and social system to the prevailing international order. This peculiarity of being a counter current country means that, necessarily, the thinking we need in the current circumstances is also a counter current thinking or, to put it with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, a counter-hegemonic thinking.
This, of course, is easier said than done. We are surrounded by capitalist modernity and its logic comes at us from different angles. From the wide production of cultural industries (television, cinema, social networks) to the attractive products of societies built on irrational consumption as the touchstone of the entire economic scaffolding.
Thinking about Cuba implies then also a Thinking for Cuba, which must begin by submitting to criticism the whole status quo that is presented to us as normal. To question the concepts on which they try to impose the capitalist representation of reality. To understand, for example, that democracy is more than bourgeois democracy and its multiparty system, but that it is, in a deeper sense, the construction of a society where there are opportunities for the full human development of all individuals, regardless of their origin or any other type of discrimination.
It is to question the logic of an economic order that puts profit as the only valid measure of things, regardless of the human or environmental costs of the process. A logic that is compromising at an accelerated pace the basis for life as we know it on the planet. An order where one percent of the world’s population obtains immeasurable benefits, where the richest societies sustain totally absurd consumption patterns, and where in 2023 more than one billion human beings will go hungry.
But it is not only the challenge to go against the hegemonic logic of capital, but also to exercise responsibly the criticism against everything that has been done wrong within the revolutionary process. To criticize everything that is perceived as harmful practices and all those ideological concessions that, without seeming to do so, compromise the continuity of the process. But to exercise criticism in such a way that we do not end up damaging what we must defend.
Socialism in Cuba is the synthesis of the two great historical aspirations of the nation since the 19th century: national sovereignty and social justice. However, our socialism is far from perfect. The hostility of the U.S. empire, the mistakes made, economic inefficiencies, etc., have left fractures that we must heal and contradictions that we must resolve.
To think for Cuba, then, is to do it from the commitment with a history, with an identity, with a political project and against the unjust prevailing order on a global scale. It is a liberating exercise: against colonialism, underdevelopment, poverty, inequality.
And this Thinking for Cuba must be affirmed and developed, inside the island, in permanent combat with that other thought that, even being born in these lands and disguised many times with libertarian dyes, is nothing more than another moment within the mainstream of world domination.
Source: mate amargo, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English
José Ernesto Novaes Guerrero, Cuban writer and journalist. Member of the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS) and the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). Coordinator of the Cuban chapter of REDH.