A Nation of Zombies
Tony Karon offers his thoughts on the Castro legacy. And though Karon is clearly a brilliant and insightful person, I have to say — what he describes as “nuanced and challenging” strikes me as an entirely unchallenging aspect of the cult of personality he vividly describes. Karon is at his best when he describes the tragedy of the Castro legacy. But I suppose I think the tragedy runs even deeper than he does.
And it’s not hard to see why. Visiting Cuba in 1994, I had been all geared up to write the sort of cynical ex-leftie P.J. O’Rourke-style political epitaph, but what I discovered — even at the height of the Special Period, when the sudden disappearance of the Soviet subsidy that had given Havana more than $800 a year for every Cuban had left them literally starving — was something far more nuanced and challenging. Typical of the experience was a young curator at an art museum, who I shall call simply Antonio. The twentysomething Afro-Cuban had a master’s degree in art history, and loved his work with a passion. But the rest of his life was hell: His breakfast consisted of a couple of glasses of water sweetened with sugar. That was all. He worked all day without lunch. And then, at night, in his darkened apartment (Havana was constantly in darkness due to power cuts), he’d consume his meal of the day — a plate of rice and beans. And then sleep, for there was nothing else to do.
Nevertheless, Antonio is loyal to the Castro revolution.
Why? Antonio’s parents had been cane-cutters on a plantation before the revolution. Not only his grandparents, but his parents. Descendants of African slaves, they weren’t that much better off. But here, 55 years later, Antonio’s brother was an electrical engineer with a master’s degree and a good job, and his sister was a science lecturer at a university in Havana. Antonio’s parents were cane-cutters; their children were university educated intellectuals. And they hadn’t won a lottery — their social mobility had been enabled by Cuba’s social system, the education and health and other programs designed to lift up the impoverished majority had transformed their life possibilities within a generation. Antonio understood all too well what his life would have been had the revolution not triumphed in 1959. And he was sticking by it, no matter how bad things got.
At the risk of trivializing the achievement of Antonio’s family, consider that we’re in fact talking about the achievement of Antonio’s family. Remarkable, isn’t it, how people who’ve scraped and sacrificed can still feel “gratitude” to a regime that in fact severely constrains their life chances? It’s somewhat less remarkable when you consider the resources deployed to zombify the population.
The trajectory Karon describes is, believe it or not, not entirely uncommon in the social democracies or, heaven forfend, the laissez-faire market democracies. I’ve know many prosperous descendants of peasants and enslaved persons. Does Antonio really understand what would have happened had the revolution not triumphed? I wonder. I wonder because Karon is a highly educated writer and intellectual, with access to a wide range of knowledge, who doesn’t seem to understand himself. Given that Cuba was one of the world’s most affluent countries in 1957, it stands to reason that some form of quasi-nationalist social democracy, the kind with elections held at regular intervals and independent trade unions and civil society groups, would have taken root at some point, possibly thanks to American pressure, possibly thanks to self-conscious resistance to American pressure. Or the repressive apparatus could have survived intact, maintaining an apartheid-like economic gap between Afro-Cubans and the rest of the population. Until, of course, demographics forced a ferocious correction, this time led by Afro-Cubans and (perhaps) their black American allies, not by a “benevolent” cult leader.
These counterfactual exercises are, I realize, a little ridiculous, but they do lend some discipline to the notion that only Castro could have delivered the desirable outcomes Karon describes. In fairness, I shouldn’t attribute this view to Karon. But I do attribute it to some of Castro’s witless cheerleaders.
Of course. This is something of which people have to be constantly reminded.
It’s hard for people who have been living in democracies all their life to realize just HOW debilitating it can be to live in a regime where one hears only one point of view, over and over again, in relentless indoctrination. We have no idea what it’s like. This is why a Western journalist would understand Antonio’s support of the Castrist regime as a thoughtful decision by an informed citizen, and not a byproduct of Orwellian propaganda.
My parents tell me the story of being at a dinner party with Soviet diplomats in Paris in the 1980s and having the wife of one of the diplomats explain that communism was better than capitalism. You see, her husband needed new socks, so she went to Galeries Lafayette to get her new socks, and she spent — literally — three hours staring at the sock rack, helpless, mesmerized, because there were so many brands, colors, fabrics, patterns… In the Soviet Union there is only one type of sock, she explained: much simpler, no need to think, no need to choose.
I am sure she was sincere, and we have to keep in mind the kind of regime, the kind of environment, that spurs such sincere reactions out of people.
— PEG · Feb 25, 07:55 AM · #
Much like Peg’s story:
During the early 1980’s, there was an interview done at a New York airport of an old Russian woman who was voluntarily returning to the Soviet Union. The media asked her, WHY would she want to go back? Her reply: “Too many choices.”
Turned out, she was simply overwhelmed psychologically by so many dozens of toothpaste to choose from in the typical American supermarket. She literally went back to a repressive culture because she could not deal with the choices that derive from freedom; she was much more comfortable in a dependency society, even though it was repressive.
A patriotic Cuban who admires his president is not a good example to offer in defense of socialized conformity. There are patriots everywhere; they are easy to find and interview, in every country. But political conformity reflects not just a mistrust of people (and ‘trust’ in psychology and psychiatry is the measure of good mental health), but it inescapably results in intellectual stagnation and the stunting of human creativity.
There is no excuse for Dr. Castro. Future Cuban historians will mark him for what he is: an absolutist and a charismatic ideologue, who froze his entire people in intellectual and financial stagnation for nearly half a century.
— a Duoist · Feb 25, 11:51 AM · #
Sure, social democracy was right around the corner, because this occurred in all the other small right-wing Central American dictatorships the U.S. backed at the time. The fantasy of an Afro-Cuban rising is even less probable – that’s why Brazil is currently run by its militant Afro-Cuban elite, I suppose.
— tequila · Feb 25, 07:28 PM · #
Doh. Afro-Brazilian in Brazil, of course.
— tequila · Feb 25, 07:29 PM · #