SX Blog

By Michelle Patiño-Flores

The Cuban Revolutionary project occupies a privileged space when thinking about alternatives to North Atlantic systems of domination. And rightfully so. The Revolution came into power on January 1, 1959, as the United States entrenched itself as an imperialist force to contend with the scientific and cultural interventions born in the Soviet Union. Revolutionary Cuba emerged at a necessary and pivotal moment in global history, demonstrating once again that the Caribbean engenders life, sovereignty, and freedom. The Cold War era — which many scholars propose has not concluded — formalized a polar spectrum of political possibilities arranged as: left:right, indexed by communism:capitalism. This artificial binary, while a useful heuristic for organizing important political propositions, has unfortunately sedimented the possibilities of governance that we have been able to imagine as scholars, generally speaking.

This is most clear now that well over half of Cubans on the island have a more accessible connection to the internet, an enormous upgrade from the 43% of Cubans who had access just ten years ago (World Bank). Online today, it’s impossible to ignore the politically heterogenous multitudes of Cubans and write them off as anomalous when they categorize their government as authoritarian, dictatorial, and otherwise violent. In the streets of Havana, these expressions are multiplied, and they are contextualized by the trash and trash fires that speckle the city, the exorbitant price of food (when it is available), constant stream of blackouts, and growing list of arrests of public dissenters and especially artists (with whom I conduct my ethnographic work). The instinctive explanation for these circumstances that many non-Cuban scholars offer proposes the history and recent exacerbation of US sanctions as the cause of such suffering. However, Cubans insist that it’s not only the US embargo that wrought these conditions, but also, crucially, internal corruption, abuse of power, and overall failure of the Revolutionary system. Many of us in academic circles in the North Atlantic choose to overlook these local theorizations or categorize them as outlying perspectives, insisting that such comments are ignorant to the sacred truth of socialism and simply products of US propaganda. Are these dismissals not forms of epistemological violence?

As ethnographers, we are tasked with making meaning out of the raw material of life. We couch our practice–sometimes–upon a position of cultural relativity, from which we develop narratives and explanations for how and why things come about and, oftentimes too, what they mean. So it’s worth deeply considering what it is that Cubans mean when they say they live under authoritarian conditions. And what if what they mean is exactly what they say? It’s preposterous to have to propose what we have long ago already accepted as feminist, activist, and other avowedly decolonial scholar praxis: to trust the knowledge of our interlocutors when they explain their experiences–especially when they are all almost invariably saying the same thing. So why is it so hard to accept that what many Cubans are saying may be true? This truth does not dilute other truths: that the US has effectively waged war on the world, and on Cuba and the Caribbean in particular, through its foundational ethos of imperialism; or that the present US government has tightened its violent grip on the embargo. Acknowledging that Cuba, but more specifically that the Cuban government, is a complex system that, like many others, is not impervious to corruption, violence, and abuse of power can only strengthen our understanding of political organizations and refine our efforts for alternative projects that affirm life.

Academia loves the Cuban Revolution. We might say it satisfies our need for an Other to aspire towards. And it’s clear that it was able to secure rights and privileges to Cubans, especially impoverished (, and) Black, and otherwise peripheralized Cubans, for some decades, though it has always done so at a great cost (like labor camps and censorship, sometimes targeting those very people it sought to enfranchise). The haze of the Revolution, what it symbolizes for the Cold War, and its significant but limited constellation of successes in the face of surrounding imperialist violence, has convinced us that it is the only or at least a worthwhile alternative to sustain against the neoliberal global order. But is it, really? Many of us are students of abolition. But it appears we get confused when the police are socialists. Why uphold the power of a system that deploys military and secret police to surveil, persecute, and arrest children, adults, and elders who post dissenting personal videos online or create art that critiques the government? Why side with power, when we can side with freedom? Cuba must not be made to occupy a hopeful slot for academics to project partisan fancies.

The solution to the Cuban Revolution is not capitalist domination. The way out of this political binary is still being imagined and prefigured in everyday fugitivity. We must dare to dream with and plainly listen to the screams, whispers, dances, and songs that countervail power and gestate the as-yet “unthinkable” paradigm shift towards an otherwise, against a binary we have invented for ourselves.

Michelle Patiño-Flores is an artist and PhD Candidate in Anthropology with a minor in Art History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Through multimodal ethnographic research, she learns from and collaborates with Black (and) queer Cuban artists to understand practices of creative freedom in contemporary Cuba. She is an arts and culture writer and has exhibited her photography across various states. Michelle is a student editor at American Ethnological Society.