Amanda Beatriz Andrés Navarro, from the Out of the Box Cuba channel, published a video this Monday in which she suggests that a portion of the Cuban population suffers from what she calls political Stockholm syndrome: a psychological adaptation to prolonged abuse that causes the victim not only to tolerate the oppressor but to applaud them as well.
"Part of the Cuban people suffers from Stockholm syndrome. That is the only explanation I have to understand those who praise their oppressors. It is not real admiration or ideological conviction; it is adaptation to abuse," he states in the video.
The central argument is that this phenomenon does not arise from conviction, but from decades of constant fear, total dependence on the State, absence of real alternatives, and punishments for disobedience. 'When someone is exposed for an extended period to constant fear, total dependence, lack of real alternatives, and punishments for disobedience, the mind seeks a way to reduce suffering. And the most effective way is that if I justify those who oppress me, the pain becomes tolerable,' he explains.
The reflection connects with two documented conceptual frameworks. The Stockholm syndrome was coined in 1973 by Swedish psychiatrist Nils Bejerot after a bank robbery in which a hostage developed emotional bonds with her captor. Although it does not appear as a formal diagnosis in the DSM-IV, its extension to the political realm describes how citizens subjected to prolonged oppression develop identification with the regime, adopting its values and normalizing mistreatment.
In the Cuban case, the intellectual Dagoberto Valdés coined the concept of anthropological damage to describe the deep deterioration of personal subjectivity caused by totalitarianism: cognitive atrophy, double standards, distrust, and paralyzing fear. Luis Aguilar León identified six concrete manifestations of this damage: servility, fear of repression and change, lack of civic will, hopelessness, insilio, and ethical crisis.
The regime has built, over the course of more than 65 years, a comprehensive system of social control that combines indoctrination from childhood with slogans such as 'Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che', community surveillance through the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution —created in 1961 with Castro's stated goal of establishing 'a system of collective revolutionary surveillance'— and total dependence on the State for employment, education, and basic services.
The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution have been for decades the most grassroots surveillance arm of the system, penetrating every block and building in the country to monitor the behavior of citizens.
The result, according to the video's author, is that the final stage of the process is not silence, but active applause. 'It is not weakness. It is indoctrination. And the final stage is not silence, it is applause. At that point, control no longer needs force; it functions on its own.'
The most compelling evidence that this support is neither universal nor spontaneous is the mass exodus: more than a million Cubans have emigrated since 2021, reducing the population from 11.3 to approximately 8.6-8.8 million. The protests on July 11, 2021, where thousands shouted 'We are not afraid' and 'Homeland and Life', demonstrated that breaking the fear is possible.
The brutal subsequent repression —over 700 sentenced and around 600 political prisoners still in 2024— reinstated the enforced silence, in a pattern that the regime has repeated every time the citizenry has attempted to express its dissent, including organized acts of repudiation against those who dare to dissent.
Andrés Navarro ends his video with a call to action and a phrase commonly attributed to Pablo Neruda, although considered apocryphal by researchers: 'It is time to free ourselves from the yoke that oppresses us, to remove the blindfolds from our eyes and awaken. We cannot be afflicted by that Stockholm syndrome forever. We must turn fear into hope. They may cut all the flowers, but they cannot stop spring. And this one smells of freedom.'
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