As 24-hour-celebrations exploded among Cubans of all generations in South Florida with the news of Fidel Castro’s death this past Thanksgiving weekend, the Cuban state’s nine-day-long, meticulously orchestrated plan of national mourning presented a striking contrast. While the international media struggled to balance images of self-identified revolutionaries’ public displays of genuine grief with other islanders’ private, whispered and mostly anonymous expressions of relief, many Cubans and “Cubanists” alike recognized the visible yet mostly undiagnosed symptoms of social tension in such scenes. Most obviously, police cordons, prohibitions on gatherings and bans on alcohol sales demonstrated that Cubans in Cuba were clearly not free to react spontaneously to Fidel Castro’s death—whatever form that might take—because such reactions would have naturally implied uncensored (and potentially uncontrollable) interpretations of his life. Four days into island commemorations, Youtube revealed the extremes to which Cuban officials would go in managing citizen discourse when someone posted a brief video clip of the Cuban government TV news anchors on a “hot mike”. In it, anchors Froilán Arencibia and Mariuska Díaz discuss the absurdity of secret government orders that they not address viewers with the traditional phrase “Buenos días” [Good Morning or Good Day], an order that both anchors—believing they were off-camera—passionately contested. Apparently, state officials gave the order because absolutely nothing good could be said or even implied about Fidel Castro’s death: “saludos” [hello], remarked the disgusted anchors, was to be used instead.
Nonetheless, behind the right of free assembly, of protest and critique of all government leaders (and, in Miami, especially Fidel Castro) that punctuated images emanating from South Florida lay more than just the simple evidence of what Cubans historically defined as “democracy” before Fidel transformed the 1959 Revolution into a Communist state. My own thoughts returned to May 2005 when Cubans on the island documented the drastic difference between their own perspectives on Cuba’s past, present and future with those of The Old Guard Exiles in Miami. Characteristically, in the absence of an independent media, they did so through a joke, broadcast deliberately over radio bemba [lip radio].
At the time, Fidel suffered multiple fractures to his leg and wrist after tripping over a set of steps leading to the stage where he was making a public appearance and speech in Cuba. Coming almost exactly a year before he would hand the reins of power over to his brother Raúl, the incident revealed Fidel’s increasing, octogenarian frailty before cameras on the national and international world stage. While Miami’s Spanish-language news media celebrated the humiliation of Castro and what they called “the biological solution”, islanders took a decidedly different view. Citizens joked that plans must already be underway among Miami exiles to build a monument to the step responsible for the accident: “Al fin,” Cubans said, “Ese escalón ha logrado lo que ni el imperialismo yanquí ni los cubanos de Miami han podido lograr en casi 50 años de lucha: la caída de Fidel Castro. [That step achieved what neither Yankee imperialism nor the Miami Cubans could achieve in nearly fifty years of constant war: the fall of Castro.]”
Arguably, island Cubans’ humorous rebuke of Miami leaders’ obsession with toppling Castro spoke to the pride that many Cubans in Cuba felt and still feel over having defeated a US-backed invasion patterned on the previous sixty-year-plus pattern of distorting and redirecting Cuba’s internal political process through military occupation and interventions. Moreover, and more importantly, the joke also speaks to another kind of pride, one most Cubans take in simply surviving the day-to-day obstacles to change that the Communist state and US isolationist policies have historically conspired to create. By preventing them from gaining any traction in an economy that the Cuban state controls, both successive US administrations and Fidel Castro prevented citizens from gaining political independence from the revolutionary state. Consequently, from the 1960s through the present, the Communist government was able to trade access to an (albeit) frayed social safety net of rations, employment and other resources for political compliance and displays of loyalty.
For almost three decades, since the fall of the Soviet Union, Cubans on the island pinned equal blame on the White House and the obstacles to change in Congress presented by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Marco Rubio, Mel Martinez and the Díaz-Balart brothers on the disproportionate sway that the Cuban exile elite exercised over US policy—at least until the Obama administration. Like these critiques, the monument to “the step that toppled Fidel” that such exile leaders metaphorically planned to build in 2005 clearly cast Cuba’s self-appointed “saviors-in-exile” into their proper role as suspect, out-of-touch bearers of a version of Cuba’s revolutionary past, present and future with which most Cubans, whether in Miami or Havana, New Jersey or Camagüey, would likely disagree. The fact that those most inclined to opine on matters related to changing Cuba from within always seem to do so from without has never been lost on island citizens.
For these reasons, the death of Fidel Castro may signify far less in the short and long term to the majority of islanders than the change of power in the White House from Barack Obama to Donald J. Trump and the landslide victory of Republicans in Congress. Without a doubt, President Obama did more to correct and reverse a course of history that should never have been than any other US President. By this, I mean not only the history of isolating the island from the world but the centralization of power in the hands of one single man, a man who believed and personified himself in the form of an authoritarian, increasingly dictatorial and militarized state from the 1960s through the present.
As the Communist-fidelista government repressed the economic and political autonomy of citizens in the 1960s, it repressed as well all possibilities of fulfilling the original promises of the 1959 Revolution to which Fidel Castro so personally, repeatedly and publicly committed. Fidel based the legitimacy of his regime and his monopoly on power on a public consensus about Cuba’s past that was anything but inaccurate: subject to external controls and neocolonial-style capitalism that repeatedly backed the most conservative side, Cuba was a nation whose state proved more accountable to itself, Washington, local sugar magnates and foreign investors than to the Cuban people as a whole. Upon assuming power in 1959, Fidel Castro did not have to invent Cuba’s history of battling for a sovereign, socially and racially equitable state because time and again, the United States’ post-1959 policies seemed to force Cubans into reliving it. The US Embargo and US aggression made US power present in its absence.
Even when the United States embraced the Soviet Union and radically altered its relationship with the Soviet Communist dictatorship of Moscow in the era of Reagan and Gorbachev, the United States did not soften but hardened its policies toward Cuba. Allegedly, US officials did so in the name of making Fidel Castro fall by forcing citizens to rebel, to do the dirty work of toppling their government and thereby open their doors to an exile-led “rescue” that would take whatever form Jorge Mas Canosa’s Cuban American National Foundation would dictate. Today, that great artifact of the 1980 Reagan campaign and later the Reagan-Bush White House seems nothing more than a bad memory. Yet the legacies of its influence over US policy, Miami’s Spanish-language media and, consequently, the shoring up of Cuban government justifications of crackdowns on dissidence, whether real, indirect or imagined, remain. Ironically, both the political power of the exile elite of Miami and the stability of the Communist regime in Cuba owe much, if not all of their caché, to the always-open safety valve of Cuban immigration across the Florida straits. Who in Cuba would then (or will now) risk organizing an armed or unarmed protest movement to transform the state as so many thousands of Cubans did before 1959 if they could simply save their lives, their families and the trouble of dying for la patria in order to live in the United States?
Today, one wonders how, if at all, Trump’s promised reversal of Obama’s opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba will affect the United States’ dry-foot policy welcoming all Cubans as refugees, few questions asked. Changing the famous 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act to reflect an anti-discriminatory stance vis a vis all Latin American immigrants could well end the Cuban state as we know it for a simple reason: in the face of an economy that remains perpetually on the brink and a government whose remaining symbol of any historical legitimacy is now dead, Cuba’s Communist Party will have to sit down—not with foreign investors or tourists—but with its own citizens’ demands and negotiate. Indeed, anyone who has traveled to Cuba repeatedly over the last twenty years has seen increasing toleration of everyday forms of resistance, public complaint, subversive information-sharing as well as the general inability of Raúl’s ever-widening security apparatus to shut such threats to state power down.
Since December 2014 when both governments simultaneously announced a bilateral opening of relations and March of this year when Barack Obama and the First Lady visited Cuba, Cuban leaders have had no argument left to make that would justify a monopoly on rule, a one-party state or a legally imposed mandate of political “unanimity” to defend against US imperial machinations. Clear to all, including Raúl Castro himself, is the fact that the once hated, intransigent and self-interested Uncle Sam has become nothing more than a straw man.
Today, Article 144 of the 1987 Cuban Penal Code prohibits all criticism, in writing or in public, of all low-ranking government leaders; criticism of Fidel, Raúl or other top officials carries a two-to-three-year mandatory minimum sentence. Unanimity has not been an “ideal” or mere lofty “goal” to be sought since 1961; it has been an enforced, surveilled, demanded and, through orchestrated plans like those made for Fidel Castro’s funerary rites, theatrically displayed requirement of citizenship for almost sixty years. It was not socialism nor communism that brought about the abandonment of liberal nationalist principles as the directing ideology of the Cuban Revolution but fidelismo as defined, reinvented and self-servingly policed by Fidel Castro himself.
Nonetheless, fidelismo in its early stages did not draw its legitimacy from Fidel Castro; rather, Fidel Castro drew the validity of fidelismo—his call to “unidad absoluta [absolute unity]” behind his leadership—from the Cuban people’s own memories of having fought against the interventionism of the United States in their country’s affairs. As early as 1898 with the first US military occupation of the island, the United States robbed Cubans of their own, self-determined, democratically-conceived destiny. After 1989, Fidel Castro revived the validity of national unity and gleaned new justifications for his one-man rule from a different source: the fear that island Cubans would never be able to compete, keep up with or impede the Miami exile elite’s US-backed plans to take over their economy, their government, their society and their future from them.
Yet by adopting capitalist reforms, the US dollar, freedom of religion and tourism as the primary basis of the economy in the 1990s, Fidel Castro’s once atheist, still Communist state created the conditions for all such fears to quickly disappear. Cuban rafters not only expanded the ranks of Cubans in Miami who “think differently” than their older exile counterparts but the children and grandchildren of exiles did as well. Today, US Cuban communities like the island as a whole are far more diverse, far more democratic than their leaders imagine or allow them to be. Fidel Castro’s death, like his life, reminds us all of the primary lesson of Cuba’s history: anything is possible.
Cover Detail and Image courtesy of Jorge Macle: This “bono”, or fundraising bond, sold by the 26th of July Movement in Miami, Florida, in the late 1950s during the struggle to topple the US-supported dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Today, it testifies to a lost history, one in which both Fidel Castro and an earlier exile community committed to fulfill and promote democracy, sovereignty and human rights in Cuba.