"The regime's police was not just something external; it was something installed in my own mind," reflected Cuban writer Yosvany García, for whom freedom does not begin when one leaves the country or the system, but rather when "you realize that you are still monitoring yourself" and decide to stop doing so.
In a recent Instagram post, García, who was born and raised in Cuba before settling abroad, reflected on the mechanisms of control used by the Cuban government, drawing on the theories of French theorist Michel Foucault and his concept of the panoptic surveillance device.
"I learned from a very young age that certain opinions couldn't be voiced out loud, that some questions were dangerous, and that not everyone could be trusted. […] I don't remember a police officer following me step by step, but I was always on guard," he stated.
In his opinion, the system is so refined, so well-calculated, that it creates in citizens "a kind of learned survival," leading them to constantly measure their words and manage their truths, even after leaving the country, as happened to him.
"Foucault was right. The most efficient power doesn't even force you. That power programs you," he reasoned. He noted that the behavior adopted under those norms cannot be decoded in terms of "heroism or cowardice," but simply as a means of survival.
Other thinkers have also referred to the mental, "anthropological" damages, in the view of some, caused by a control apparatus sustained for decades, like the one in Cuba. They have also emphasized the urgency of breaking it, not only through physical, bodily protests, but especially by seeking mental liberation.
The regime continues with its mechanisms and tools of surveillance and repression, which could have been called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) yesterday and are now “My Neighborhood for the Homeland”, although in many aspects they remain quite similar.
Many, including García, argue that the way to emancipate oneself from such chains involves the choice of "not self-persecuting" and leaving behind the "remnants of old surveillance" that weigh on the shoulders.
The panopticon, when applied to prisons, consisted of a circular structure with a watchtower at the center, designed so that one or a few guards could observe many prisoners, and those prisoners would never know whether they were being watched.
On the Isle of Youth, that mechanism was set up in the sadly infamous Modelo Prison, whose countless crimes during Gerardo Machado's dictatorship in the 1930s were reported by journalist Pablo de la Torriente Brau.
Years later, Fidel Castro and the assailants of the Moncada barracks were imprisoned in that same jail. Ironically, after seizing power in 1959, they would turn the entire nation into a panopticon.
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