Translated by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant.
Celia Hart Santamaria, a Trotskyist militant and daughter of Cuban revolutionaries Haydée Santamaria and Armando Hart, once told me that the 26th of July Movement black-and-red flag was modelled after the anarchist one. Boris Luis Santa-Coloma, who was Haydée’s first boyfriend and who died during the revolutionaries’ 1953 Assault on the Moncada Barracks, was an anarchist himself, as were both parents of another famous revolutionary, Camilo Cienfuegos. According to Celia, an anarchist impulse marked the Movement’s nascent imaginary, spurring it to create a Libertarian Left removed from Euro-Soviet totalitarian practices.
I have not been able to verify Celia’s testimony, since she is no longer with us. A few years ago, Cuban television broadcast an interview with a man from Holguín, a veteran of the 26th of July Movement who claimed to have designed the flag. He did not mention anything about anarchist influences.
Today, a new Left is emerging in Cuba. Its very existence is hard to swallow, both for the most visible dissident groups — those that defend a future inextricable from capitalist democracy (liberal or social) – and for official ideologues, for whom questioning state power is Utopian at best. This is a different kind of Left, unfamiliar both to Cubans’ common sense and to proponents of classical market economies. Among Right-wing dissidents, this New Left is often depicted as “light officialdom,” whereas for those siding with state socialism it appears as a pro-capitalist liberalism under the guise of anarchism.
What are the groups that make up this alternative Left? We can roughly delineate four tendencies:
The first is Marxist academia. Mostly born before the fall of the Berlin Wall, these academics have Western and Latin American Marxisms as their main intellectual referents.
The second would be composed of a younger group of artists, writers, independent journalists, and digital activists, in their thirties or older, with multiple intellectual influences. These include contemporary art, literature, social philosophy and audiovisual production, and most notably those from the late Soviet and post-Soviet cultural and artistic imaginary.
The third group would include members of the middle ranks in the pyramidal structure of power established in Cuba since 1959, including academics, members of the bureaucracy, etc. Mostly born around the time of the Revolution, their referents are Marxism and neo-Marxism, Cuban nationalist thought, and the realpolitik of democratic socialism, including Scandinavian social-democracy and the Latin American populism of Kirchner, Ortega or Mújica. Their networks grew around the bulletins produced by the SPD (Participative and Democratic Socialism), a group that disseminated ideas of co-operativism and self-management within socialism.
Finally, we have radical anti-capitalist collectives, with people aged 35 and over. These are a variety of groups whose positions are explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and are inspired by the writings of Anarchism, Trotskyism, Feminism, Environmentalism, Queer Theory, Neo-Luddism, and others with radical critiques of state socialism.
These latter groups are deeply distrustful not only of capitalism and the so-called “normalization” process now in motion, but also of the State. Groups like Observatorio Crítico or Critical Observatory (defined as a Leftist group for “autonomous communication and counter-information”), the anti-capitalist Libertarian Workshop “Alfredo López,” the anti-capitalist LGBTIQ collective ArcoIris (Rainbow), the environmentalist network Guardabosques (Park Ranger), Desde la Ceiba (From the Ceiba Tree, an Afro-descendant grassroots communication group), and the Study Group Haydée Santamaria (engaged in alternative social research), approach Cuba’s contemporaneity from anti-authoritarian perspectives. That necessarily takes them to question the official attempts to “normalize” society by implanting in Cuba what in a presumably “normal” world is considered as “normal” – a project that, they contend, entails the naturalization of global inequality.
The so-called “normalization” of relations with the United States, as a first step for an opening to the world once the embargo disappears, raises the question of what “to normalize” is and what “normality” means. Indeed, “normalization” is a polysemic term in Cuba today, and it is applied not only to the improvement of diplomatic relations with the United States, but to our aspiration as a nation- that of becoming “a normal country.”
we can pinpoint at least two complementary notions of freedom at play in the Cuban public sphere. . . .One focuses on the individual, within the legal framework of his or her rights . . .
Activists from the Dissident Right-Wing claim that, along with the Cuba-US diplomatic normalization there should be an internal normalization within Cuba. This line of argument makes sense, since the presence of the imperialist enemy –now in process of becoming a normal neighbor- was always intrinsic to the Cuban government’ official discourse as well as to its institutional structure. The alternative to that would a complete break –political, semantic, subversive- with the world system and therefore with the Cuban status quo. In other words, if we consider that we live in a “normal” planet, then we should support Cuba’s insertion in it as a process of “normalization.” If we do not accept the naturalization of the world’s conditions as “normal,” and consider instead that it is suffering from a civilizational crisis, then we need to actively engage in social change. That means also interrogating notions of prosperity, sustainability, and development that are used both in relation to positive global processes and, within Cuba, in relation to state socialism.
In this context, we can pinpoint at least two complementary notions of freedom at play in the Cuban public sphere. These two notions do not necessarily correlate with specific ideological positions, but cut across them. One focuses on the individual, within the legal framework of his or her rights, and the other one is posited in relation to other individuals and institutions, including the state. According to the former, one individual’s freedom ends where the other individuals’ begins. At the same time, there is an awareness of freedom as socially shared. In this second view, other individuals’ freedom is a necessary condition to mine. This latter idea is of course not new. What is new is that this collective notion of freedom is now inextricable from the rejection of authoritarian and totalitarian models of government. It is also bound up with the critique of normalization at all levels –country and planet.
Indeed, for the new Cuban Left, the notion of freedom as something necessarily shared is tied to one of “normalcy” as bounded to that elsewhere in the planet. And that is the case because what is now in Cuba considered a “normal situation” corresponds to a predicament of un-freedom for many people around the world. This is why an activist New Left must raise a consciousness of freedom as necessarily about solidarity, and therefore shared by all. This is the aspiration contained in the colors of the flag –and flags- that Celia Hart was talking about: a red representing social justice and equality, and a black that stands for the uncompromising struggle for freedom.