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The Cuban historian Dr. Mario Juan Valdés Navia, Associate Researcher at the National Humanities Center and Duke University, published an essay this Friday in which he argues that what occurred in Cuba since 1959 was not the failure of a communist utopia, but rather a deliberate attempt to destroy the republican order in order to establish a family dictatorship.
In his text "Ten Steps of the Collapse (1959-1960)," published on the CubaxCuba portal, Valdés Navia argues that the regime established since 1959 sought to "dismantle the entire republican civilization and its historical-cultural memory—except for the exaggerated and distorted communist inheritance—in order to erect, for ages to come, a state at the service of a family power group, employing the tools of totalitarianism and the disguise of the 'first anti-imperialist trench in America'."
The academic, separated from Cuban universities in 2011 for writing critically about government policies and welcomed in 2023 as a Scholar at Risk at Duke University, documents ten milestones from the first two years of the revolution that illustrate how "between sincere enthusiasm and popular measures, the civil Republic was dismantled and a despotic State was constructed."
The first milestone dates back to January 3, 1959, when Fidel Castro promised in Santiago de Cuba to subordinate the weapons to civil power: “Our weapons respectfully bow before the civil power in the civilist Republic of Cuba.” However, the provisional president Manuel Urrutia immediately appointed him Commander in Chief of all Armed Forces. “The subordination of military command to civil authority lasted barely two minutes,” notes Valdés Navia.
On February 2, 1959, the Council of Ministers approved Law No. 44, which established that in Fidel's absence, Raúl Castro would replace him as the head of the Armed Forces, ensuring the dynastic military control of the Castro brothers from the early days of the regime.
Five days later, the Revolutionary Provisional Government published the Fundamental Law of 1959, which effectively replaced the Constitution of 1940, eliminated the separation of powers, reinstated the death penalty, and introduced the retroactivity of criminal law as well as the confiscation of private property without compensation. The then-Prime Minister José Miró Cardona resigned from his position in refusal to accept the regulation, and Fidel assumed absolute power over both the legislative and executive branches.
In May 1959, the First Agrarian Reform Law was implemented by the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), chaired by Fidel himself, transforming private latifundia into state-run superlatifundia known as "People's Farms," rather than distributing the land among landless peasants. The expropriations employed violent methods and unleashed a civil war that lasted until 1964, resulting in thousands of victims and displaced people.
In July 1959, Fidel forced the resignation of President Urrutia, accusing him on national television, and reassumed the premiership "by acclamation" at the July 26 event. "From that moment on, there was no longer any mention in official political discourse of free elections; on the contrary, any reminder of Fidel's electoral promises outlined in unifying documents disappeared or was suppressed as a 'counter-revolutionary' manifestation," writes the historian.
In 1960, the regime suppressed press freedom, annulled the right to strike, and created the Revolutionary Instruction Schools to impose Marxism-Leninism as the sole ideology. The republican civil society was dismantled and replaced by official organizations—CDR, FMC, CTC-R, AJR, UNEAC—that, according to Valdés Navia, "closed the doors to any form of dissent or opposition to governmental decisions and acted as conduits for the will of the supreme leader to the masses."
The academic also emphasizes that the U.S. embargo dates back to 1962, after all the milestones of the republican dismantling that he documents, and there is consensus that the multidimensional crisis that Cuba is experiencing depends more on internal causes than on external factors.
The conclusion of the essay connects the past with the present: "Economic consequences have gradually turned Cuba into a country begging the world." Today, the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights reports that extreme poverty reached 89% of the population in 2025, while the island is going through its worst economic crisis in decades, with chronic blackouts and sustained mass emigration.
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