The crisis does not distinguish species
July 22, 2022
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l past July 14 there was a spontaneous demonstration
in Pinar del Río and in Havana, due to the prolonged power outages that have been occurring in recent months. With pots and pans, shouting slogans against the Castro regime and in particular against its president Miguel Díaz Canel. The power outages that have been going on since times even before the “Special Period in Peacetimes”, have been increasing. According to official sources, this is due to the fact that there is a limitation in the infrastructure that forces these cuts to be made. However, this is due not only to a general lack of electrical capacity, but also to an exercise in control of the population, which is increasingly affected by a general crisis situation.
This is one of the problems that has been adding to the scarcity of food, medicine, access to services, which together with repression make Cuba more unlivable every day. In response to the demonstrations on July 14, the Cuban government cut off Internet access in the early hours of the morning to prevent the dissemination of the videos on social networks. Apparently, the commemoration of 11J has caused an increase in the suspicion of the regime, avoiding any type of agglomeration or disorder.
And even the unofficial Cuban left has declared that the situation of the population in Cuba is unsustainable. Recently, the Communist Association of Cuba, a group of Trotskyist origin, issued arelease in relation to the electricity cuts generated in Cuba. According to this group, the regions most affected by these cuts were precisely those in which the demonstrations of 11J, last year, were minimal or non-existent:
“Cuban leaders do not suffer these long power cuts and shamelessly call for the working class to resist. At the same time, although they try to limit the breakage of thermoelectric plants as the main cause of power cuts, the truth is that the lack of maintenance of these institutions is due to the neglect of the bureaucracy, which continues to prioritize the tourism industry" states in the statement.
And the argument of the blockade, in these circumstances, shows great wear and tear within the Cuban population. It is evident that for the Cuban population there is also an internal “blockade”. The measures taken by the regime continue to favor small sectors of the population to the detriment of its population. Ironically, those who suffer the most are those who obey the most. With a certain sarcasm, the inhabitants of Cuba allude to the recent situation in Sri Lanka to reflect on their own reality and, perhaps, consider new courses of action.
And it is that the problem does not lie only in the already serious lack of supplies, supply of goods and provision of services. The issue is that anyone who demands minimum living conditions, who makes a claim for their fundamental rights, not from politics, but from common sense, carries the anathema of being a counterrevolutionary, financed by the capitalist interests of this or that country. of being a sellout. The unit of thought, action and obedience ignores the other and therefore seeks its annihilation.
Humanity depends on the possibility of identifying with some in relation to others and for this to happen there must be a possibility of identification at the individual level and at the collective level. Instead, as a cohesion tool, the Cuban regime insists on selling, in misery, the universalist, unifying, totalizing model. In part, this desire to maintain control has meant that, in addition to preventing the development of free thought and free agency, a community that can contribute to its own subsistence through private and personal enterprise has been disabled. From difference and freedom, even a welfare model benefits, with a robust State that is responsible for providing a large part of the goods and services to a population.
From freedom and difference, there is a real possibility of criticism and self-criticism that allows the growth of the individual and the community. Diversity frees even governments from paranoia, solipsism and schizophrenia. Freedom allows even in moments of material difficulties to generate innovative ideas to overcome difficulties. The rejection of freedom and individuality generates precisely these precariousnesses, this revolutionary-counterrevolutionary Manichaeism, which still persists, perhaps in other guises, in the mentality of the regime and its followers.
This annihilation of the other is, to a large extent, the cause of the crisis situation in a country that, given its strategic geographical location and the potential material resources and human capacity it has, should have sufficient capacity to alleviate many of the precarious conditions in which its population finds itself. It is very difficult to be different in a country without light, without food, without basic necessities. It is very difficult to recognize yourself as another when you do not have the means and the spaces to raise your voice.