I have been suggesting that Hong Kong provides an important baseline against which one might usefully analyze the situation in Cuba. Most people are focused elsewhere of course. They are embroiled in (1) the romance of revolution; (2) the glorious authority and tragedy of unbalanced conflict where sympathies must rest with the weaker group (something that was nurtured over the years in the development of the discursive stratagems for de-legitimating Israel and cultivating the underdog tropes); (3) the indulgence in obsolete but appealingly false analogies to middle class revolutions and the European experience of overthrowing Soviet Marxist Leninist regimes (now a generation out of date); (4) using the current protests to manage the internal politics of the United States in and through the quite divisive politics of the Cuban diaspora there; (5) relying on the legitimating power of international standards for the protection of civil and political rights (in ways that proved eventually irrelevant in Hong Kong); and (6) abstracting the bodies of Cuban protesters for longer term purposes (the value of sacrifice) and delegitimating the current political-economic order.
All of this is fair game. And one would have been surprised not to see this combination of well meaning obsolescence at play in Cuba. It is a pity. Like most things involvng Cuba, the discourse and the arguments tend to be as anachronistic as the baseline against which they are made--1 January 1959. Centuries form now people will wonder at this as a unique global phenomenon--as a bubble in global space that is 'out of time' an 'timeless' but with respect to which the albatross of 1 Januarary 159 ahngs heavy on the neck of the Cuban people and the intellectuals who now appear (apologies) t profit form this discursive and startegic stance on all side so the debate. I have been making these points to no one in particular for some time. See, e.g., Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism: Essays on Ideology, Government, Society, and Economy in the Post Fidel Castro Era (2018). But then I would be ashomed if I also sounded like the herd mentality that propels what passes for analysis among the current Cuban vanguard and its opposition; two sdes of an anachronism desperate to vindicate a position whose time has come and gone. And yet the victims of this discursive obsolescence remains the Cuban people who are buffeted by and are managed within this quite pathological space.
But to my point: Just as the Hong Kong protesters developed (finally) a list of Five Demands that were eventually rejected and now serve as the basis for prosecution under the post protest rectification in Hong Kong, so too the Cuban people may be developing their own equivalent to the Hong Kong Five Demands. I came across one that will likely capture the essence of the emerging position (at least beyond the borders) that is worth a careful read. It follows below with thanks to Ailynn Torres Santana for posting. Those follow below in the original Spanish.
While it is impossible to say what will emerge, this nicely captures the essence of the sentiments now widely circulated and supported among critical elite players. At the same time it exposes quite nicely the way that the Cuban protests are following the Hong Kong playbook. That does not bode well, at least in the short run, for this cycle of protest. But the future is unclear. The anger of the Cuban people is now unavoidable. Mere suppression may be attainable in the short run, but that provides the state apparatus only a very short breathing space to meet its public responsibilities before the eruption that follows, one which may be far far more difficult to meet. And that is the real issue here--if the vanguard continues to avoid its own (even minimal) responsibilities guided by its no longer plausible shifting of blame for everything on the U.S., then there is very little that is available to support its authority. This is a reality that transcends ideology and one that can no longer be avoided.
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