Cuba: Cynicism as politics

By Elena Larrinaga and Manuel Cuesta.

“We know that they lie to us. They know they lie. They know that we know that they are lying to us. We know that they know that we know that they lie to us. And yet, they continue to lie,” is how he expressed himself. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer author of Gulag Archipelago, reflecting the moral state of the Soviet ruling class in its time.

It is curious and symptomatic that the phrase springs from a moral order, the Russian one, that another writer, Paul Valery, characterized as especially cynical, and in which a non-virtuous series of elements were mixed: circular poverty, aristocratic mentality and reason within an elite of power without circulation, cultural contempt for those below, technological backwardness, a deep pessimism regarding the idea of progress and a centuries-old, accumulated distrust between those who rule by repressing and those who live poorly in a perpetual state of servitude.

In this ecosystem, the lie, in its two fundamental aspects, the simple and the complex, becomes the structural bond, the main communication mechanism between those who hold the misery of power (a power without rules can only be exercised miserably) and those who hold the power of misery.

Because yes, there is a power in misery that is very well treated by the intellectual. Peter Sloterdijk in Critique of cynical reason. This book explains, in a masterful way, how cynicism/kinism represents the escape valve (power in misery) of the dispossessed people. Now, this gross, direct, unceremonious cynicism is a consequence, and at the same time an expression, of that more refined cynicism, something tortuous and always sinuous that lives in power, in those who govern, in the form of a structural lie; that structural lie that avoids at all times its stark ways, almost of self-abandonment, and already uncovered, which would reveal cynicism in all its dance and splendor.

When the lie is structural, the cynicism of power is almost undetectable; It manages to hide, for example, under the pulled mantle of utopia. It is a cynicism that does not seem like it, that is not seen. His problem begins when he begins to be discovered, to be noticed, when his structure falls apart, his mantle falls and becomes unstitched, and everyone frowns. As now, in front of that emigration from this nation.

That is its worst moment, the moment in which cynicism, clinging to its lie, appears as such, as cynical cynicism, and assumes its terminal and decadent phase. When “we know that they know that we know that they lie to us. And yet they continue to lie.”

The Cuban political elite finds itself in this cynical moment of cynicism. Which, although it is a sign of decadence, is, paradoxically, not good news for the democratic transition. For two connected reasons: in this phase, the lie is the only objective data, with its psychological impact on the behavior of the elites, and from that moment on, the reality principle that is essential to face profound changes is lost. The problem, thus present, is huge, almost majestic. Because in this way cynicism, which is not exclusive to any type of person or any country, can become typical of a culture. As is happening in Cuba.

The example of this cynicism, in its political aspect, has just premiered in a very high-profile setting like that of the Universal Periodic Review which every four and a half years is done regarding human rights to all countries that make up the United Nations system. And it continues in this other unofficial and official headline without content: Nation and Emigration. A homeland of discretionary use, let's say.

Unconcerned with the ethical implications of double speech, immersed in demagoguery, muttering the theoretical sentence of the Constitution and rights, without due conviction and persuasion of the words, the numerous official Cuban delegation did not have the intelligence to say at least one TRUE. He tried to hide there what everyone already saw, mask what cannot be hidden and falsify what has left behind its status as a hypothesis in the face of the rigorous burdens of proof shown by the brainy. reports presented by Cuban and international civil society organizations.

There is a serious problem here of historical mismatch in the Cuban government. His response scheme is still anchored to the time before the creation of the Human Rights Council (2006). So, at the time of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the evaluations focused more on the casuistry violation of civil and political rights, and less on second generation rights, within a stone list of violating countries, and with a less integrative vision, focused more on the criminal consequences of the exercise of these rights for civil society actors than on the social, political and institutional conditions that enable their practice by society.

That favored the quarrelsome style of the Cuban government. Each annual meeting of the Commission was a propitious occasion for the political platform of ideological discourse in the face of documented reports of Carl-Johan Groth, the imperturbable and ancient Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Swedish nationality appointed by the United Nations for Cuba between 1993 and 1998, and of the French Christine Chanet, Special Rapporteur between 2005-2006.

But with the establishment of the Human Rights Council three important changes occur: one bad and two good. The bad? Any country, with enough votes from the remaining States, can become one of the 15 members of the Human Rights Council (the Cuban government is almost a dean there). The two good ones? First, Cuba is no longer the Special place to evaluate human rights behavior, now all countries are evaluated equally; and, second and defining, the evaluations are carried out over long periods, which means a structural change in favor of the preparation of analytical reports, full of data, evaluated over time, contrasted with many sources, with a process approach, within of institutional frameworks and subject to external review by recognized experts. All with a new conceptual vision: the analysis of human rights within identities: gender, racial, minority, etc.

And then? Well then. The Council is more like an academic tribunal for master's graduates who present theses documented in four and a half years of research and where, for reasons of time, only short summaries supported by countless sources are allowed to be read. The word examination has rarely had the relevance that it has acquired in the Council because the rapporteurs run the risk of being disavowed. And we already know the consequences, worse than those of going to prison: all credibility is lost for those who do not have the support of power. All of this, by the way – an important parenthesis – upsets not only the rigor, but the very civic condition of the organizations that the government introduces as the true Cuban civil society. These only place ideological data behind a battle order, where independent civil society presents social data after a tiring and risky collection of information.

Faced with a type of “academic” court that evaluates human behavior based on tabulated data, the government landed with the same rhetorical artillery loaded with insults and distractions from 30 years ago, which in the midst of a state of denial installs cynicism where “they know that we know they are lying to us.”

They are cynical because they lie in the face of the same transparency of knowledge, data and knowledge.

Their defensive lines were baffling there. They said that “Cuban laws prohibited arbitrary arrests”, which is true, except for those who have the power to stop: the police; They questioned the existence of femicides, trying to resolve the mess with the appeal to the “murder of women”, precisely the criminal expression of feminicide; They affirmed that there are no “electoral barriers”, erasing the Candidature Commission in charge of filtering who is and who is not in the nomination of candidates; They lavished an alleged primacy of constitutional law after they banned the March for Change called for the end of 2021; They said that no one is imprisoned for their “political opinion” in the country where they are tried for “enemy propaganda”, they marginalized the prisoners of 11J, a group of whom were tried for “sedition” and reduced, for a change, to a “media campaign to subvert the constitutional order of the nation”, the critical and documented reports, contradicting what they affirm: that freedoms are recognized by the Constitution itself. How can the use of the Constitution then subvert it?

Cynicism uses a recurring resource to address its needs for power: self-denial to seal its hegemony. A way in the psychology of power that the police in Cuba verbalize in a rude style: 'yes, so what?', they blurt out whenever they are called out for their systematic violation of the law. No longer talking about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Cynicism, especially political cynicism, is a form of corruption: it always destroys the moral and ethical basis of institutions. From it a new dimension has been born in the autocracies, not by chance, in Latin America, in which the Cuban authorities take the lead: that of governments without the people and against the people. The epitome of the cynical regimes of our time.