Cuba, its septuagenarian revolution and the heavy burden of July 26

That historical phenomenon calledcuban revolution He has been celebrating years and breaking promises since he was born,July 26, 1953, with the forceps from the assault on the Bayamo and Santiago barracks. Only, year after year, the prophecies of replacing the totalitarian State that spawned that revolution with another transition towards democracy are also unfulfilled.

Theforgotten lessons of 9/11 are that the repressive apparatus of the State crushed the popular protests in less than 48 hours, with barely one death, and that the leadership of the opposition movement was conspicuous by its absence to confirm that mass protest without such leaders is equivalent to such leaders without masses.

The political alternative has always been bullets or votes, but giving military training and weapons to opponents,as the Cubanologist Jaime Suchlicki proposed, It is the swan song of the belligerent counterrevolution, while the peaceful counterrevolution has even called for people to stay at home and do nothing instead of going to vote against the government.

No one should be alarmed by the term counterrevolution to define the political position against the prevailing government in Cuba. If he continues chanting revolution in each neighborhood, every opponent can and should adopt the same position ofRonald Reagan against the Sandinista revolution: “I am also a contra.”

The electoral war

But as the political scientist demonstratedAlbert Otto Hirschman inExit, Voice, and Loyalty (Harvard University Press, 1970), it is of no use in politics to count who stays at home or leaves the country [Exit]. Only the correlation of forces between active dissidence [Voice] and loyalty to the regime [Loyalty] is relevant.

So, in the absence of bullets, there are only votes left, but the peaceful counterrevolution stagnates between desperation, because the totalitarian State has not just fallen, and confusion with any opposition gesture without practical political consequence.

It is said everywhere that waging an electoral war leads to nothing. —as if other forms of struggle had given any results!— well there will be fraud, but fraud has always been and will be inherent to every election. It can only be minimized. Thus, the peaceful opponent who does not vote is equivalent to the armed rebel who deserts.

And if the Cuban people - or their majority - are against the government, whether visibly in street protests and social media downloads or invisible at home, they do not and will not have a better political opportunity to demonstrate what they do by exercising their right to vote. . Abstaining ruins this unique opportunity.

If those people take to the streets in fragments, but do not finish voting, in their majority, against the government candidates and in favor of opponents - by show of hands in the neighborhood assemblies to nominate them and secretly in the electoral colleges to elect them - to Cuba You will have to lose again and again. The NATO generals or the UN blue helmets or the exile are not going to prevent it.

The weight of boredom

No political order is shaken because people abstain from voting. Abstention in the United States presidential elections, for example,has always exceeded a third of the voters since in 1980 participation percentages began to be computed based on the census of people eligible to vote.

Nor is the dictatorial order in Cuba moved by rampant abstention. Making fun of the fact that almost a third of the electorate in the entire country and almost half in Havana do not go to vote is another vain political illusion that fights for its respects in the peaceful counterrevolution. Abstention only makes it easier for the single party to take all the seats up for voting in the municipalities.

If the builders of the democratic transition prefer to capitalize on the discontent of the population by making it politically inert by staying at home instead of waging an electoral war, they will have to go somewhere else because the mix is over. The peaceful counterrevolution will then continue to vent its venting in denunciations of repression without generating political will capable of putting opponents in municipal assemblies to fracture the totalitarian State.

And if the peaceful counterrevolution is not articulated around the direct action of the vote in the earthly world of politics, there will be so much despair, becausethe dictatorship continues to die without burial like the confusion with any irrational opposition gesture will continue to set the frenetic pace in the media world.

Of course, one day the totalitarian state spawned by the Cuban revolution will collapse, but that day will take another 70 years or more to arrive if today's peaceful counterrevolution continues just as yesterday's belligerent counterrevolution: living off disappointments until dying from delusions.