Cuba

Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat

Description

Cuba: The Doctrine of the Lie is a thoroughly researched and profoundly revealing work on two themes of vital importance to the world today: the true nature of totalitarianism and how religion, philosophy, culture, tradition, and individual freedom are the most effective antibodies for countering this deadly ontological virus. Approaching Cuba’s history as both a rallying icon for the radical left and an engine of freedom activism for the powerful Cuban-American community in the United States, this study helps dispel the black legend about life in Cuba before the communist triumph in 1959, reveals the destructive ideology behind the façade of Che Guevara’s socialism, explains how so-called agrarian reform camouflaged the structuring of a police state, and provides unique insights into the dynamics of the struggle of the Cuban Resistance. Cuba: The Doctrine of the Lie explains how totalitarianism was established and consolidated in Cuba and assesses the repercussions that event has had for America’s domestic ideological spectrum. Resulting from personal conversations with key actors, research into original sources, and a thorough knowledge of Cuban history, this book represents a vital contribution not just to the field of studies of totalitarianism but also to the study of Cuban history as a whole.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Histoire
• Communism
• Ideology
• Totalitarianism
• Political philosophy
• Latin America
• Cuba
• History
• Communisme
• Totalitarisme

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 29 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680537437
• Langue: English

Extrait

Cuba: The Doctrine of The Lie
Dr. Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat
Academica Press
Washington∼London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gutiérrez-Boronat, Orlando (author)
Title: Cuba : the doctrine of the lie | Gutiérrez-Boronat, Orlando.
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022939903 | ISBN 9781680537413 (hardcover) | 9781680537420 (paperback) | 9781680537437 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat
Contents Foreword In 1959, Cuba fell into a void Chapter One The Totalitarian Entity: Revolution, Nationalism, and Totalitarianism in The 20th Century Chapter Two Che Guevara: Doctrine and Symbol of The Lie Chapter Three Cuba 1959: Agrarian Reform, Campesino Resistance, and The Construction of The Totalitarian State Chapter Four Cuba: Republic, Civility and Reconstruction Chapter Five Of Young Nations and Caravans Afterword Index
Foreword
In 1959, Cuba fell into a void
Frances Martel, International News Editor, Breitbart News
Not Cuba the island—though that, too, has been lost to time—but Cuba the ethnicity, the identity, the place that lives in the seams in our hearts beyond the beaches and crabs and dilapidated Spanish fortresses. The tiny pressure on the lower back of every Cuban that presses in and pushes up our shoulders, gives our heads that lift of confidence in knowing what we are and what we can get away with. The Cuba in our eyes that seems to intimidate everybody else when we walk into a room.
I cannot imagine what a feeling it must have been to fully drape that Cuba around us before it fell under the siege of the void. I can read about how electric Havana felt to the tourists who came to see us first and the beaches second; and I can imag ine the mood at a literary party in 1800s New York when José Martí dropped by. I can look at before-and-after pictures of Miami; I can see a Cuban-American astronaut eating black beans in space. But I was born in 1987, Year 28 of the void, and right alongside that buoyant pride lifting my head is the acute emotional pain of the shards of Cubanism, splintered by the void, stabbing me in the back.
I cannot wear my Cuba without someone seeing the void instead. I can’t talk about Cuba; I can only shout about it over the piercing screech of the void. Most of the time, no matter how loud I’m yelling (and remember, I’m Cuban), whoever I’m talk ing to will just address the void— or, worse, assume that the void is the Cuba that I was talking about.
This book is about Cuba. It is about the void. And it will teach you to distinguish the two. It is not a beginner’s guide to the history of the Revolution, and it will likely do little to bring clarity to a reader unfamiliar with the main characters and the general scope of the destruction that the Cuban Revolution brought to the island. However, to those who meet this level of familiarity—almost every Cuban on earth—this book offers a tremendous sense of clarity of self, and with it, pride. The Revolution, this book boldly asserts, does not define Cuba, or what being Cuban means. Quite the contrary, the ultimate goal of the Revolution was to destroy Cuban identity; and, in this sense, it failed, starting with the Cuban Revolutionaries themselves who fought tooth and nail against the void when it became clear to them that the void was not there to simply overthrow Batista, but to crush Cuban identity.
The Revolution was neither popular nor successful in its ultimate goal, thanks to the blood of thousands of dissidents—and the rebellion of more than a few around Castro—who refused to let die the fierce individualism, indomitable work ethic, and hunger for self-determination that defines what it means to be Cuban. It was not successful because, thanks to those sacrifices, millions fled into the free world and built Cuban communities from the ground up all around the world, each one a black eye in the face of the Revolution.
In this book, author Dr. Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat first deconstructs what exactly befell Cuba under Fidel Castro to later prove that it is nothing unique to Cuban identity or culture—to prove that it is nothing at all. It is a totalitarianism that, as Gutiérrez-Boronat asserts, demands of its subjects a “collective inferiority complex,” the destruction of cultural exceptionalism in the name of fighting a largely fictionalized enemy (in this case, the American “empire”). Just as there is no such thing as dark, only the absence of light; or no such thing as cold, only the absence of heat; there is no such thing as evil, only the absence of Good. There is no such thing as the “new Soviet man,” or the man of the Revolution. There is only the Cuban, and the void.
Gutiérrez-Boronat accurately assesses that the goal of Castroite communism, from its disruptive birth in the Moncada barracks, was to erase every idiosyncrasy, every vice, every virtue that distinguishes Cubans from the rest of the world.
Gutiérrez-Boronat writes that Castro installed the Communist Party as “a reason in and of itself, a teleological subject of history whose existence marks a leap forward in human consciousness, creating a new stage in history.”
Fidel was not smart enough to have come up with that on his own. The first unified Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, called it tianxia, or “all under Heaven” (referring to everything that he should control). The god-kings of Egypt and the pre-Columbian American empires similarly saw their rule as all-en-compassing and far beyond the merely political. In our Eurocentric world, tyrannical thinkers like Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx get much of the credit these days for what Argentine-Celt butcher Ernesto “Che” Guevara deemed his “something akin to faith.”
The void is universal—but the Cuban is not. We must understand both. Cuban identity prior to 1959 was already dizzyingly complex and fairly new, as far as ethnic identities go. Many Cubans consider the Taíno chief Hatuey as our first national hero for his documented irreverence to the Spanish—Hatuey allegedly used his dying words to hope to land in Hell, after being told that Spanish Christians go to Heaven. But, obviously, Hatuey himself did not identify as Cuban; his defiance is merely the kind of thing true Cubans aspire to.
Cubans are “designer” mutts. Few can claim to be genetically Taíno; most are Spanish and African (note: not Spanish or African). Thanks to the Jesuits, many are Christians worshipping Nigerian gods using European names, unknowingly using Yoruba slang or cooking African staples like cassava and okra. Cubans are also Chinese and Jewish, a little bit Anglo-American and quite a bit Portuguese and French, thanks to the already complicated ethnic nature of the population in the Canary Islands, from which many criollos descend.
Cubans are also very American, whether they like it or not. “American,” of course, is its own hodgepodge identity, sculpting itself out of the rubble of its own civil war while Cubans were just starting to think of themselves as fully “Cuban.” That civil war, incidentally, counted with Cuban fight ers on both sides, just as the American Revolution counted on the largess of Cuban families funding George Washington’s army. Not shortly after the Civil War ended, Cuba embarked on its own attempt to sever from Spain through the Ten Years’ War. It would not achieve independence without America, and it would take until 1902 for the Republic of Cuba to be founded.
America, being only 90 miles away, created a sibling rivalry most acutely reflected in “Nuestra América,” an essay published by Martí in 1891, where he desperately warned Cubans to define themselves before the Americans do it for them. The lone flag on the Cuban star is a symbol of that sibling rivalry—it is essentially there to say that “we don’t need anyone, especially the Americans.”
I introduce all this history only to ask: how old is Cuban identity? Cultures like those of Egypt, China, or Iran have had thousands of years to define themselves. Persians and Chinese existed in ancient times. Cubans, on the other hand, did not exist until, at the absolutely earliest, 1492, because the peoples from which we were born did not meet prior to Columbus’s miraculous arrival.
It took another 100 years, give or take, for pure Spaniards to dilute into criollo identity, and for those criollos, in turn, to define themselves as Cubans—as something other than Dominican or Tampan or Mexican. Cubans thus only had between the early 1600s and 1959 to figure ourselves out without being subject to the destructive onslaught of the void. Much more developed civilizations—Rome, the Olmecs—fell to less pressure after existing for many more years.
And yet, as this book shows, Cubans are still Cuban. The void failed.
That does not mean that Cuban identity is not in tatters, and understandably so. Many of the most Cuban of Cubans don’t speak Spanish anymore or speak a bastardized Clockwork Orange post-Soviet Havanese that alienates them from the rest of their Cuban family in the diaspora. They’ve never seen an uva caleta or a mamey or a jutía— their hearts belong to Los Angeles, or Tenerife, or Baku (yes, there are Cubans on the Azerbaijani Olympic team). There are millions of Cubans who have never roasted a pig for Christmas, and most of them are on the island of Cuba.
Even our names are not our names anymore. The Cubans of the Free World have integrated positively into their new communities, often leaving behind their Spanish names in marriage and procreation. Cubans have names like “Ryan Lochte” (the American Olympian) and “William Levy” (the telenovela actor). On the island, Cubans have used the one freedom they have left—to make babies—to assert their individuality through naming their children absolute gibberish. It can be easy to laugh at baby Yumisneisy or Osmani, but every Robelkis is a lost opportunity for the Revolution to raise another Fidel, making it a much more meaning