Harvesting the Value of Cuba's State of Misery by All of their Consumers--Reflections on Frances Robles, Ed Augustin and Hannah Berkeley Cohen,"10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost (New York Times 27 December 2024)

 

 

The New York Times, in the style of contemporary media organs that are in the business of advancing their business--along with their view of the way the world ought to be ordered, and thus ordered, understood, and thus understood, presented in palatable forms for mass consumption for those who must either be conformed in their solidarity of belief and those who must be brought to the right belief in the right way with the right organization of fact, supposition, and cognition--tends to have a ready box of bricolage that define that mission and its manifestation as news/narrative. In the process, entities, like the New3 York Times construct and reconstruct themselves, and in the process, construct and reconstruct their rationalization of the world in which they see themselves as a part of the vanguard of social forces around which it is possible to construct and enforce collective cognition, and with it the social solidarity necessary to maintain a stable collective order. 

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Nothing wrong with that, one can suppose. And certainly the New York Ties is a speck on the creature the aggregation of which describes the human talent for ordering itself in contextually relevant ways across a vast spectrum of micro systems that, according to our academic elites, might itself be rationalized as the various fields of human knowledge, that are both rationalizing tools and the substance that the tools represent for aiding collective cognition (Ruminations 95: Policy as an Oscillation With the Illusion of Progress in the United States, China, and Cuba).  

All of this is fairly banal; and frankly of little interest give its ubiquity and necessity for ordering human collectives by reference to something--anything--that serves that purpose in ways that suit its members. What little interest there ought to be can be divided into two usual approaches (of course there are infinite possibilities but these two serve the purpose, with a techno-bureaucratic and a post-colonialist camp thrown in for spice). The first, and largest approach starts from the inside. It accepts the core premises of collective cognition and its context, and then focuses almost exclusively of making them better, or destroying them and substituting another. This is the space that news organs, like the New York Times and its simulacra everywhere on Earth are situated--as are the priesthoods and overseers of the systems they are charged with maintaining, perfection and fighting over for dominance in a world that starts form the presumption that such cognitive systems are a predicate for civilization. They are, of course, correct in the sense that only through collective belied may abstractions be made real. The realization of myth is the ambrosia that perpetuates the abstractions made manifest on Earth and through them offers salvation (The United Nations Summit for the Future--On the Phenomenology of Progress and its Platforms). 

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The second, and the most interesting, but least socially useful (except in crisis and for for fundamental quality control of myth systems and the incarnation of cognition) starts from outside. That is easier said than done. But the effort itself may sometimes be enough. One does not speak here of critique (discussed eg here), which is most respects might be best understood as an inverted mimesis of the thing critiqued. The criticism that blossomed in the modern era in all systems were useful as an internal quality control device, but all of them were as loyal to the system in which they provided a delightful diversion, as the orthodoxy they critiques. In all these cases one worried--to use the Marxist-Leninist terms for it, right and left error. One Never posited that the system itself was error.  Even in its current manifestation--the excruciating self-referencing critique of liberal democracy as structurally flawed, there is very little in that critique other than substitution (which within systems is always labelled transformative). Rather it is one that posits that all systems are themselves grounded on something--and it is that something is itself worth considering. Such a consideration does not obviate the need for incarnated abstractions as the orthodox materialism of human collective systems. But it might help either to better understand their nature, or to use them. There is no getting out of systems, or systemic conceits about their truth, value, importance, inevitability or the like. But there is a striving to approach human systems form the outside of their own systemicity (even with the understanding that one is still creating and using some sort of rationalizing system of cognition grounded in the cultivation of a self-referencing perception. 

That brings us, at last, to Cuba and the New York Times.

Cuba has been a special referent for the constitution and protection of two distinct sub-collective system of Enlightenment rationalization--represented at their edges now in the form of what might be usefully labelled liberal-democracy and Marxist-Leninism. Cuba has, for three quarters of century, served the interests of both in the construction of themselves and of the other. It is a convenient space e--an island--which can be quarantined and studied, a self contained laboratory that can be utilized by the techno-priestly castes of the leading forces of these larger sub-meta systems, to develop themselves and to project their respective visions on and through the other. Cuba, in this sense, has been one of the most useful productive forces of myth for the last several decades--serving as the basis for the incarnation of virtually every sort of late-Enlightenment system of collective rationalization, and the space within which contests among them might be road tested for use there and elsewhere. But production is grounded in the consumption or at least the exploitation, of those factors essential for its operation. What appears to have been consumed in the process of the production of various episodes of the social collective game of Mythica appears to have been the human elements of the system itself (Discussion Draft Posted: "Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline").

Writing for the New York Times, Frances Robles, Ed Augustin and Hannah Berkeley Cohen, have produced a marvelous reproduction of the sort of mythos wrapped in facts (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations — which many believed would transform the island — Cuba is in its worst crisis since Fidel Castro took power, New York Times 27 December 2024).

This story like its variations published as a sort of religious obligation from time to time, that serve the collective rationalizations of a faction of the American liberal democratic lebenswelt in ways that nicely illuminate (and I use that word in all its senses) object, process, and signification. It is an excellent product of its type and place and can serve both as a reminder of the costs of myth making and the value produced in the continued consumption of the Cuban people for the edification of liberal-democratic, Marxist-Leninist, and post-colonialist camps.

The title of the reportage provides the framework. First is the mythical qualities of the passage of time, measured, since the French Revolution in the West, in intervals of 10 (on the magical quality of anniversary briefly here), provide justification. The regularization of passages of time and their significance for the elaboration of myth--in this case analyzing the presumptions of a progression of events marked by time, and the failures of that progress--are critical markers. Second, the containerization of time serves as the framework for the conundrum posed by the premises of the mythos of Cuba from an American perspective--in this case the mythic American president (Bridging Across Perception: The Statements of Presidents Obama and Castro on the Normalization of Relations Between the United States and Cuba). The object then is easy to understand--a reportage, the essence of which is to provide a fact based story the object of which is a morality tale about liberal democratic missed opportunity (in the force of a natural or inevitable regime change) the the price to be paid by those who choose to ignore it. At the same time it is also the story of a valiant vanguard pf social forces heroically fighting against the subversion by an ideological imperium, the cost of which is also borne by the people over whom all of this fighting is ostensibly about. Both, it appears, enjoy a good feast on the misery of the people which serves each as a vindication of their own narrative and an indictment of that of their opponent. 

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The story starts with the price--and the moral around which the tale is to be told. Ten years ago the Cuban people were fattening their wallets by plucking dollars out of the billfolds of quite willing American tourists who were at the start of another narrative induced orthodox duty: to dissipate a generational accumulation of wealth on experiential activity (It wasn’t long ago that Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution was packed with American tourists knocking into each other with selfie sticks while taking photos of the iconic image of the revolutionary Che Guevara and trying to catch a ride in a candy-apple red 1952 Chevrolet Bel-Air.Today, those polished 1950s-era American convertibles that came to symbolize quintessential Cuba sit empty, the tourists they once carried largely gone." (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations )).   

And then the ideologically embedded tonic: "Ten years ago, President Barack Obama stunned the world by restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba,. . . But a financial implosion caused by a cascade of factors — the tightening of U.S. policy by the Trump administration, Cuba’s mismanagement of its economy, the crushing effect of the Covid-19 pandemic — has kept visitors away and launched an immigration exodus of epic proportions." (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations ).

Where to begin. . . .  

From the inside all of this makes sense--because it articulates in particularized forms the expectations built into the way that the Americans, the Cubans, and those others who profit from their functional relationship (styled as dysfunctional precisely because that plays into all mythos around Cuba at the moment). This is the (or ought to be) tired templates of the evil empire and the peasant revolutionary, of the imperialist colonialist against the the pacific indigenous populations held together by fused ethno-cultural identities (From Hatuey to Che: Indigenous Cuba without Indians and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) and so on. From the outside, however, the pathologies at the heart of the reporting suggest the kernels of strategic deployment of dysfunction in the service of a functionally stable relationship from which all actors profit--the U.S. and Cuban political apparatus, and the Norns of interested ideological camps from the post-colonial and so-called anti imperialist camp of developing states, to the techno-bureaucratic neo-Leninist European center, to the vanguard of 21st century Marxist-Leninism in East Asia (Cuba's Caribbean Marxism: Essays on Ideology, Government, Society, and Economy in the Post-Fidel Castro Era (2018, Little Sir Press)). Those who profit do not pay; the price is borne by the masses whose multi-generational sacrifices continue to bloat the bodies of those managing the enterprise of misery. 

First, the myth of Mr. Obama as some sort of Arthurian hero makes for good narrative but hardly captures the (then dying) world of 2014. First, there was a long run to to the restoration of relations.  More importantly, if one is to indulge in mythos, then it might be more accurate to suggest that Mr. Obama at the time served as the incarnation of Kali, an apparition of death and rebirth. Mr. Obama's performance in Cuba managed in some ways to undo all of the work necessary to establish relations.  His vigorous representation of the mythos of the United States and his robust defense of regime change in the form of popular movements in his address during his state visit to Cuba (something that would never be tolerated in the United States) managed to frighten the Cuban Marxist-Leninist nomenklatura (led by Fidel Castro in his waning days) back to the markets rejecting Soviet central planning models of the 1970s (as set out in their Conceptualización del modelo ecnómico y social cubano de desarollo socialista; discussed here). More interesting still is the easy assumption that the Cuban model post restoration was to be built on the backs of Americans tourists  and their (culturally induced) experiential lifestyles). And the Cubans committed a greater error--believing that they could stall negotiations until the inevitable victory of Mrs. Clinton with whom they might have envisioned a better deal. The reporting was polite: "Ricardo Zúniga, a top Obama aide who conducted the secret negotiations to restore diplomatic ties, acknowledged that the administration failed to calculate how strongly allies loyal to Fidel Castro would oppose U.S. measures after the former leader spoke out against them publicly." (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations).

This much, certainly is true: "Many Cubans put it succinctly: 10 years ago, there was hope. Now, there’s despair.“You go on the street, and people’s smiles are fading,’’ said Adriana Heredia Sánchez, who owns a clothing store in Old Havana." (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations). There was hope. The narratives, fears, and conceits of the elites in both countries managed to bungle and then kill that hope. Yet that might not have been a loss for either--though, as the reporting suggests, it had devastating effects on the objects of all of this elite vanity. For the Cubans, the effects of the miscalculations between 2014-2016, and then the tightening thereafter (though that too, was in some respects more mythic than real) provided a basis for blaming the Americans for all of their errors, missteps, and strategies.  It played well precisely because the mythos in Latin America, the post-colonial world and elsewhere expected the United States to behave badly, and were incline to read events and gestures in ways that conformed to their expectations (cognitive limitation and preference). It played even between  for Europe--that could come in as a sort of liberal democratic alternative--suitably techno-bureaucratically driven, so that there could be a governance cultural alignment between European and Cuban nomenklatua memorialized in the standard textual representations that united their interests against those of the Americans (discussed here). And it played best with  American opponents for whom the events post 2014 could be constructed into a vindication of their vision of a United States intent on regime change in Cuba (and thus reconstituted as a sort of Neo-imperialism, one that overshadowed the more subtle forms of the new Communist international). 

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Nonetheless mythic myopia tends to shape the application of fact to conclusion: "Cuba’s unraveling underscores the United States’ oversized role in the country, and comes as Donald J. Trump is about to return to the White House: He has nominated Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida and a Cuba hard-liner, to be secretary of state." (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations). The statement has many uses, few of which are of any interest in and to Cuba. First, it perpetuates the idea of American complicity n te state of disaster in Cuba as attributable to Mr. Trump's vindictiveness rather than shared with the cupidity, arrogance, and mismanagement of Mr. Trump's predecessor (and their respective bureaucratic apparatus). Second, in another twist of arrogance, the statement might well be read to imply that Cuban actions and decisions have less effect on the state of the Cuban condition than decisions taken in Washington. That sort of thinking, of course, has tending to haunt American foreign policy in Cuba d¡for some decades. And in many respects, the Cubans are far more responsible (imprisoned within their own interpretation of their revolutionary mythos) for the state of misery that the Cuban people find themselves than the influencers, hangers on and their public officials sitting comfortably in Miami, New York and Washington. But there it is--this is not so much a story about the institutionalization of the state of misery among the Cuban people; it is a story about a very American fear and loathing of Mr. Trump as an American demon and the beatification of Mr. Obama as its (last) saint:

“If Obama had run for president in Cuba, he would have been elected,” Jaime Morales, a tour guide in Havana, said laughing. Mr. Obama also eased U.S. policy toward the island, allowing American cruise ships to dock in Cuba, more U.S. airlines to fly there and more Americans to visit.Then, President Trump reversed course. In 2018, after mysterious illnesses befell U.S. embassy employees, which some believed to be an attack by a hostile nation, he sent so many workers home that it effectively closed the embassy. (The Biden administration reopened it in 2023.) in his last days in office, Mr. Trump also returned Cuba to a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation severely limiting its ability to do business globally and that President Biden kept in place. (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations).

And, indeed, the theme runs through the reporting (eg "Several Cuban American members of Congress who favored the restrictions also held considerable sway, and critics said the White House was concerned about the political landscape ahead of November’s election." ibid.). Mr. Trump remains the object of a demonization of the "american stroyline" against which protection is (still) required ((As the Trump Administration Fades into the Shadows of History (and Myth) Lessons Left Unlearned)).

Third, it suggests the profound state of ignorance, or strategic misconception, that has marked the American position since 1959. An example from the reporting touches on the surprise about the inability of the Cuban state to adapt to market measures, and to open its internal consumption lines to American interest. "But the government was slow to authorize contracts with U.S. companies, while small businesses faced many bureaucratic roadblocks." (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations). All it would have taken would have been an afternoon reading the Conceptualización del modelo ecnómico y social cubano de desarollo socialista to figure that out; better yet to speak to those in the United States well aware of the ideological and normative basis as a result of which the nomenklatura central planning impulses of the state would not be magically written away without substantially undermining the structures of the state (as it saw itself in integrated form) in accordance with its own mythos. That suggests that the initial impulse--the photo op could not bridge the realities of integrating two fundamentally incompatible ways of engaging in economic activity or conceiving of the role of economic activity within a political model. The Cuban model could not conceive of a penetration of its internal markets except by and through the state and its organs. The Americans could not conceive of a system in which their private enterprises could not freely penetrate where private law could taken them supported by a compliant legal system willing to enforce contract. The Cuban State was still debating the value of contracts and its enforcement in the Lineamientos of 2008. And yet the Cuban model itself remains subject to its own contradictions--the reduction of production to an object of authority within the administrative apparatus, corruption, and the poltics of productive activity where it is seen as a tool of broader goals (eg here); anf there is money to be made on both sides of the Straits of Florida (here).

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And the conditions--that is worth describing in its manifestations in 2024: the power outages, the crumbling infrastructure (though that is an old story), the state of medicine and medical treatment, and the out migration. All of that is contrasted to the heady days of elite performative solidarity: "The sense of misery is a far cry from the excitement felt the week in 2016 when Mr. Obama attended a Tampa Bay Rays baseball game in Havana with Cuban President Raúl Castro." (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations). If only the Cubans would have taken the hint and adapted to the new realities all would have been well and transition to something more palatable might have been possible "But Cuba, one of the officials said, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Cuba’s harsh crackdown of a popular uprising in 2021 left hundreds of people in prison, which made it harder for Mr. Biden to justify easing restrictions, the official said." (Ibid.). That might, at best, be half right. The Cuban nomenklatura and its senior Party apparatus has indeed never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.  But those opportunities have been internally generated by their own experts, those loyal to the system, or at least indifferent to it, and been rejected  in the years before the American diplomatic overtures.  Having rejected reform from within along socialist lines, there is no reason to presume these officials would fall all over themselves to accede to the American vision which would necessarily included a self destruct mechanism for the present system. .

And again, Mr. Obama's aids help manage the storyline to suit their perception in ways that center the United States as hero and the Cubans as the cause of the state of misery that their people find themselves in because they just would not transition to a political model more suited to the tastes of the United States (either in the more benign Democratic establishment version or in the more orthodox Republican establishment version).  Ricardo Zúniga, a top Obama aide who conducted the secret negotiations to restore diplomatic ties helped shape the storyline in this direction, and from his perspective rightly so. "“My biggest takeaway is that Cuban government leadership never took advantage of opportunities to allow for gradual change in response to popular will,” he said. “So now they are stuck with social collapse.” Ben Rhodes, another former Obama aide who worked on the negotiations, said that Mr. Biden’s decision to largely keep the Trump policies was particularly damaging, because it made them “bipartisan.” (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations). Mr. Biden remains an in between interlude between the shining city of light on the hill and the Pit (The Dashing of Expectation--The Biden Administration and Cuba; Neither the Obama or Trump Line for the Moment). 

And then the punchline: Mr. Rhodes poses the rhetorical question--“What U.S. interests are advanced by trying to turn a country 90 miles from Florida into a failed state with a starving population?”(Ibid.).  Indeed. There are any number.  The first touches on the conditions that some might think are a necessary predicate to regime change.  Another might touch on the utility of misery as living proof of the failures of advanced Soviet style Marxist Leninist central planning models as an object lesson for other states (that has not worked well). And, ironically, a state of misery can serve as a foundation against which U.S. generosity might be manifested, either through trade (the US remains a significant trading partner of Cuba) or by ensuring that Cuba's debt remains substantial but not entirely debilitating. But it also serves Cuban interest--stability, the purity of its model, the ability to leverage the US relation to punch well above its weight in international circles, and to preserve its sources of significant private foreign aid in the form of remittances. (Discussion Draft Posted: "Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline"). The temptation ot continue to use the Americans as the reason for their failures. "The Cuban government said recently that Mr. Obama’s brief rapprochement was positive for the country, but it was followed by eight years of aggression. Officials on Friday held a large protest outside the U.S. embassy. José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez, Cuba’s first ambassador to Washington when the embassies reopened in July 2015, said the United States was to blame for Cuba’s ills. . . Cuba’s inability to maintain its electric grid is directly tied to U.S. sanctions that cut the country’s income, he said." (10 Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost:A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations). And it certainly plays well with the international community (General Assembly renews long-standing call for end to US embargo against Cuba).

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And there it is. The reporting is not so much useful for its reporting on conditions in Cuba.  Much of that has been reported and in more detail elsewhere.  It is at its best for its reporting, or at least performance, of a certain way of organizing the world and then applying facts to suit its cognitive pathways. In that sense the story continues to worth two quite interesting angles.  The first feeds the emerging narrative/counter-narrative that divides the American institutional left from its mirror image institutional right.  The second deepens the critically important narrative of American values  and its promise. If one is to be saved, one must open one's heart to and accept the power of the normative values of liberal democracy and individual autonomy. That is more important than it might sound. It is the antipodes of another powerful way of rationalizing the world. And that is the point. From the inside the logic and power of these visions is clear. From the outside, however, it is possible to better grasp how micro-impulses or internal contradictions can drive any vision to errors of the left and of the right, in this case in bot the U.S. and Cuba. Those who bear the risk of these errors, however, are forced to live in a state of misery--what appears to be the performance of a contemporary totentanz. And yet it is a totentanz that has provided substantial value to a host of states, NGOs, and others who are in the business of protecting and managing the cognitive franework within which collectives are organized and operate.  What becomes most real is the incarnation of belief--fed, it seems, on the misery of those  from whose condition value is extracted in full measure. 

There is perhaps a better pre-modern vision of the state of misery in Cuba--and that is the condition of Job 6-12..

6 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. 7 And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. 8 And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? 9 Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought? 10 Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. 11 But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face. 12 And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord.

There are moments when one is tempted to think of the Cuban people in Jobean terms, the object of a divine bet the forms and purpose of which are beyond the competence of those who are forced to bear it.

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