Envy as a Weapon of Tyranny: Divide to Conquer

Communist regimes do not merely seek to suppress humanity; they also aim to degrade it. For over a century, they have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to cultivate fear, suspicion, resentment, envy, opportunism, and rivalry. They need citizens to be distrustful of one another because a society where solidarity exists is much harder to subjugate.

There is an old tale that perfectly explains the phenomenon. A genie appears before a very poor Italian farmer and says to him, "Today is your lucky day. Tell me your greatest wish." The farmer points to his neighbor's magnificent vineyard. The genie asks, "Do you want one just like it?" "Of course!" he replies. And the genie grants him an extraordinary vineyard.

Later, he travels to the United States and meets a destitute farmer. He asks him the same question. The man points to his neighbor’s modern and productive farm, complete with tractors, harvesters, barns, and abundant crops. “Do you want one like that?” “Of course.” And he receives a farm as prosperous as that one.

Finally, the genius arrives in Cuba. He finds a famished, malnourished farmer living in a hut with a dirt floor and asks what he wishes. The man points to the neighbor: "He has a hen with ten precious chicks." "Do you want a hen with ten chicks?"

"No, man. What I want is for them to die!"

History is a caricature, naturally. It does not portray the Cuban peasant, but rather the type of human being that requires a tyranny: one who, instead of fighting to improve their own life, finds satisfaction in seeing the neighbor’s life worsen.

Divide and conquer. Communist regimes quickly understood the importance of this maxim.

Since the Cheka was established by the Bolsheviks in 1917, followed by the GPU, NKVD, and later the KGB, the Soviet political police was much more than just a tool for detaining opponents. The Cheka quickly acquired powers for summary justice and participated in terror campaigns against those considered enemies of the new Soviet regime. Over the years, the system refined less visible tools: infiltration, influence agents, rumors, forgery, propaganda, blackmail, bribery, and misinformation. The so-called Soviet "active measures" aimed specifically to weaken adversaries and manipulate their perception of reality.

The political police of East Germany took these methods to an almost scientific level through what was called Zersetzung, literally "decomposition."

The Stasi documents outlined the objective of provoking and exploiting contradictions among adversaries to fragment, paralyze, disorganize, and isolate them. Among the documented methods were discrediting reputations, orchestrating professional failures, sowing doubts, instigating suspicion within groups, exploiting rivalries, and using the personal weaknesses of their members. They also resorted to anonymous letters, real or manipulated compromising photographs, rumors, and false indications that a particular opponent was collaborating with the political police.

The political police of communist Poland also studied and infiltrated opposition organizations, attempting to dismantle their structures, anticipate their movements, and develop scenarios aimed at weakening them.

Countries change and the names of institutions change, but the logic remains the same.

First is the overt repression: imprisonment, long sentences, isolation, interrogations, beatings, physical and psychological torture, threats, surveillance, hunger, denial of medical care, executions, and, in some communist regimes, penal camps and forced labor. North Korea remains the contemporary extreme example (the Castro-communist regime follows its lead): the United Nations has documented political camps, executions, forced labor, hunger, and increasingly widespread surveillance.

But there is another, much more silent form of repression: Getting adversaries to do part of the oppressor's work for free.

In Cuba, this mechanism can start with something as basic as envy. If an opposition leader receives an international award, the repressive apparatus knows it can attempt to turn the recognition into resentment: “Why was he awarded and not you?”

If an independent journalist gets a job at a major outlet: “Look at how they live. And what have you received?” If an activist publishes a book and earns income from their work, accusations arise that they are appropriating resources meant for others.

If someone has numerous followers on Facebook, Instagram, or X: "That person craves too much attention and is using you to achieve success and benefits."

And the mechanism can descend even further.

One can exploit who dresses better, who has a less deteriorated home, who receives financial aid, who has an attractive partner, or who enjoys any small material advantage. Not because these things hold political significance, but because the goal is precisely to uncover the psychological weakness of the individual.

The historical documents of the Stasi demonstrate that this type of personalized manipulation is not a fantasy: their strategy was precisely to uncover individual vulnerabilities and use them to create jealousy, rivalries, insecurity, and suspicion.

Current Cuba maintains a wide range of repressive measures. Amnesty International has documented arbitrary detentions, illegal surveillance, harassment, criminalization, physical and psychological violence, cruel and inhumane treatment, deaths in prisons, and pressure exerted even against the families of activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. In 2025, it also recorded threats, interrogations, surveillance, and abuses against opponents, artists, students, and journalists.

However, no political police could create these divisions if it did not find fertile ground to plant them.

Here lies our responsibility. It is legitimate to disagree. It is essential to denounce a truly wrongful act. No leader, organization, journalist, or activist should be above criticism. However, there is a difference between holding someone accountable and turning envy into a guide.

When someone devotes ten times more energy to destroying the reputation of another opponent than to denouncing the regime that keeps Cuba without freedoms, something is deeply wrong.

When we wish for a compatriot to fail simply because they received recognition that we wanted, we are, consciously or unconsciously, working for those who wish to divide us.

When a Cuban who once belonged to official structures genuinely breaks away from the dictatorship and begins to work effectively for freedom, the intelligent approach is to judge their current actions. Prudent distrust may be reasonable; condemning them eternally for starting late can become yet another mechanism of fragmentation.

The dictatorship needs us to turn companions into rivals, rivals into enemies, and differences into personal wars. It requires the peasant who does not ask for a chicken to feed his children, but rather hopes for the neighbor's chicken to die.

Liberty demands exactly the opposite. We should aspire for our neighbor to have ten hens, us twenty, and the next one fifty. For a journalist to be successful and others to learn from him. For an opponent to receive an award and others to rejoice. For a writer to publish a book and others to write their own. For those with talent to use it, for those with resources to share them, and for those with recognition to put it at the service of the common cause. Envy destroys, solidarity strengthens.

A dictatorship can imprison people, infiltrate organizations, spread rumors, and create lies. What it cannot do, if we do not allow it, is turn our hearts into instruments of its political police.