By Ana Hurtado on October 2, 2024 from Havana
A dangerous war is being waged in the symbolic, in the realm of ideas, politics and psychology.
They have taken the power to officialize concepts. They tell the world what is dictatorial, what is right and what is wrong. In the Göebbels style, by repeating it so much through different channels, people assimilate it without stopping to ask themselves: And why so?
Since the Cold War, the country that wanted to make the world believe that it had defeated fascism, which was not the case, began to impose an invisible dictatorship, although sometimes not so much, on what to think, what to do, how to reason, what to consume and, at the end of the day, how to be.
And whoever does not want to obey the imposition is demonized and easily and without consequence they call him a terrorist or a sponsor of it.
What this empire is doing with the world is simply a sample of neo-fascism. A fascism that mutates over the years and adapts itself to societies and context to perpetuate itself together with capitalism that plays its game and use each other. Together with mediocrity.
With Plan Condor in the 1970’s they created a laboratory in Latin American countries. They formed puppet governments with armed forces specialized in the repression of the people and in the maintenance of the power of the executive, but totally useless in defense. Not prepared, for example, for military invasions, but if we think about it, who could invade militarily if not the United States? And if so, a weak armed forces in this aspect would always be convenient for them.
They will never be able to get away with anything. Fascism is the enemy of the peoples, of the people. Not of governments.
They try to perpetrate plans in other countries so that if they succeed, they can expand them to other latitudes. Venezuela, in the words of its Minister of the Interior Diosdado Cabello, is an example of this. What they are trying to do with it, the subversion plans they encourage, the dirty machinery against its government, is nothing more or less than a continuation of the “school of the Americas”, wanting the people to murder and kill each other. That is how they taught it and that is how they still want it to be.
We did not call it fascism before, but isn’t it? We have had a time in which we have been taught what fascism was like but not the ability to see what it has morphed into now. Either we identify it with each and every demonstration, or it will end up being too late in many cases.
We must be prepared for the current context. You don’t solve a problem now with the same methodology as you did fifty years ago. Times change and that is how it is. There are some unfortunate ones who, even in the name of the Revolution, have come to accuse us of being “perestroikos”. Those of us who insist that time changes, which is no more and no less than the famous “sense of the historical moment” of Fidel’s concept of Revolution.
When we say that times change, it is to approach them in the revolutionary way that corresponds now, to make this cultural and social system continue to be at the forefront and not remain stagnant in time.
But we do not remain in the voices of those who, without the capacity to do and transform anything, criticize those who try to keep the new man and woman prepared for what is to come.
We want to encourage to think and to think ourselves. We don’t want to be dogmatic and to drink from the sources that can enrich us. We know that for revolutions to be sustained, they need us to know how to interpret the wishes and interests of the people through, among other ways, that of permanent dialogue.
There is no way for us to have a sense of belonging without feeling that we matter, that our problems are taken into account.
The people, in spite of the United States, are not laboratory mice. In spite of those who say they are revolutionaries but who live in 1960 and do not know what the historical context is, the peoples are heterogeneous. And therefore they must be led and guided.
I learned something in the course on the Cuban Revolution that I am taking at the Institute of History of Cuba: Society must be reflected in the leaders. And both Fidel knew and Díaz Canel knows that space must be opened to all those who are not enemies of the Revolution. Not only to revolutionaries. You have to conquer souls, you have to read and see in order to be able to believe.
But all these tasks are difficult because it is not easy to take a breath of healthy wind in a world under a dictatorial regime.
The planet lives in a dictatorship, not perhaps like the ones we have been taught exist, but in a system where we have been deprived of the ability to discern. There are many forms of dictatorships, just as there are many forms of democracy. Since it is out of context to take tanks to the streets and invade countries (although if they have to do so, they do that too), they resort to other instruments, such as the persuasion of minds and cultural colonization, through bribery if needed, that strips men and women of their bonds of belonging and identity.
And everything becomes vulgar and decadent. Because people believe they are alive, but their hearts and senses are dead, even if science certifies the contrary.
It is the dictatorship of vulgarity. The one that enters homes and families so that their members stop loving, so that artists stop creating, so that we all stop believing and just follow the pattern they put in front of us. The vulgarity that is the enemy of freedom, of autonomy and of the desire to do.
Only those who are not free ask for freedom. A gang of people enslaved by a capitalist system that uses them, asks for freedom for Cuba, which they know is free. But freedom is not free. It takes sacrifice, suffering, it takes unrelenting resistance. It takes passion.
And it is not that the vulgar are not willing, it is that they cannot. Within their lack of freedom, even to think without imposition, their way of life is to continue satisfying countries that treat them as immigrants, no matter how much residency or nationality they may obtain.
Capitalism is racist and classist. And at any time, whoever is not born in their western and imperial lands, can be discarded and will also be looked down upon with contempt.
While they are colonizing you ideologically and culturally and you consume their lifestyle, you neither write, nor read, nor think. You just talk and repeat while trying to “fit in”.
The free individual lives without expecting congratulations from a master, because he knows he does not have one, that the greater cause we defend, powerful, makes us all free.
And knowing that we do not need applause, because most of the time when you are applauded it is not because you are doing something right, but because it suits the applauder. By whom does it suit us to be applauded or cheered? By a patrol of vulgarians whose aspiration is to have the freedom to choose between McDonalds or Burger King?
No, thank you. We work without listening to the cries of others, because only from work and perseverance is the meaning of life born.
Those who choose the opposite path to the imperialist master, are often singled out and rejected by society, but this does not say anything about the rebel, but about society.
What do we see in the society of the so-called first world? Men with a craving to possess. But great men have never had this slave morality. Material ambition necessarily denotes vulgarity and mental infertility.
Capitalism, imperialism, fascism and their diverse modalities today, die to maintain a supposed peace based on incapacity of constructive and creative thought, to perpetuate the vulgarity of conceptions in societies that surrender to the established power.
Now, the vulgarized masses are interested in success, material novelty and in not bothering to think about what is wrong and what principles govern life. It is easy for the dictatorship of the vulgar to control its subjects with a standardization of ideas in order to stop any social progress that might question it.
They also use vulgar media in the purest style of old village women in a barnyard in the last century. Sometimes we do not realize that this new world sinks the geniuses and makes originality disappear.
We revolutionaries must generate from scratch and make ourselves, as well as think ourselves. We know that the Revolution must be told everywhere, with the principles that founded it. Fidelity is not only in word and thought but also in our attitude towards life.
We do not need merely foreign opinions when we have deep conviction. Only the morally enslaved, the insecure and weak seek in the strength of others what they themselves lack.
To stand up to the vulgar, it must be every day.
Innovating, changing what is necessary. The best way to solve nothing is to talk endlessly. The performance of one person is worth more than the discussion of forty without action.
The vulgar man pretends to bury the revolutionary and that his genius disappears. He is a slave of the transient and lives for prizes, rewards and congratulations, while many are discarded.
To live without thinking about the latter and to live apart from them ensures that the work is worth by itself, without interference, without anyone being tempted to approach it because of the label of the recognition or the year in which it was granted.
Why so much mediocrity in this period? Because there is a shortage of men and women capable of feeling that they can create great works, new visions of the world; because we need women and men who can uproot idleness and give us back hope. To them, but also to us. Not for nothing, but because we can never stop having it.
Because just as Marx waited for Lenin to put some of his thoughts into practice for the first time, or geniuses like Beethoven, Copernicus or Galileo did not see the fruits of their work and thought during their lifetime, we know that the results are almost never immediate. We may not even see them as we would like to. But this does not mean that we should stop thinking, doing and, ultimately, saying. The inspiration of building for a new inclusive, mutually beneficial world, that we may not experience, should be enough reward.
Only in this way will we remain free and fight against the vulgarity of those who oppose us. I humbly believe so.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – english