Envy as a weapon of tyranny: divide to conquer

Communist regimes do not only aim to repress the individual; they also seek to degrade him. For more than a century, they have shown an extraordinary ability to cultivate fear, suspicion, resentment, envy, opportunism, and rivalry. They need citizens who distrust one another because a society characterized by solidarity is much harder to subdue.

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!" the farmer replies. And the genie grants him an extraordinary vineyard.

Later, he travels to the United States and meets a bankrupt farmer. He asks him the same question. The man points to his neighbor's modern and productive farm, with tractors, harvesters, barns, and plentiful crops. "Do you want one just like it?" "Of course." And he receives a farm as prosperous as that one.

Finally, the genius arrives in Cuba. He finds a starving, malnourished farmer living in a hut with a dirt floor and asks him what he desires. The man points to the neighbor: “He has a hen with ten beautiful chicks.” “Do you want a hen with ten chicks?”

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

History is a caricature, of course. It does not depict the Cuban peasant, but rather the kind of human being that thrives under tyranny: the one who, instead of striving to improve their own life, finds satisfaction in seeing their neighbor's life worsen.

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

Since the Cheka was established by the Bolsheviks in 1917, followed by the GPU, NKVD, and eventually the KGB, the Soviet political police became much more than just a tool for arresting opponents. The Cheka quickly gained powers of summary justice and participated in terror campaigns against those deemed enemies of the new Soviet regime. Over the years, the system refined less visible methods: infiltration, influence agents, rumors, forgeries, propaganda, blackmail, bribery, and misinformation. The so-called Soviet "active measures" were precisely aimed at weakening adversaries and manipulating their perception of reality.

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

The Stasi's documents outlined the goal 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, provoking suspicions within groups, exploiting rivalries, and utilizing the personal weaknesses of their members. They also resorted to anonymous letters, compromising photographs—whether real or manipulated—rumors, and false indications that a particular opposition figure 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, there is open repression: imprisonment, long sentences, isolation, interrogations, beatings, physical and psychological torture, threats, surveillance, hunger, deprivation of medical care, executions, and in some communist systems, prison 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 form of repression that is much more silent: Getting opponents to do part of the oppressor's work for free.

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

If an independent journalist finds employment 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 intended 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 help, who has an attractive partner, or who enjoys any small material advantage. Not because these things have political importance, but because the goal is precisely to find the individual's psychological weakness.

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

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

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

Here lies our responsibility. It is legitimate to disagree. It is essential to denounce something that is truly wrong. No leader, organization, journalist, or activist should be above criticism. But there is a difference between holding accountable and turning envy into a compass.

When someone spends ten times more energy trying to destroy the reputation of another opponent than in denouncing the regime that keeps Cuba devoid of freedoms, something is profoundly wrong.

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

When a Cuban who once belonged to official structures sincerely breaks away from the dictatorship and begins to work effectively for freedom, the wise approach is to judge their present actions. Being cautiously distrustful can be reasonable; condemning them forever for starting late may, in fact, become another mechanism of fragmentation.

The dictatorship needs us to turn comrades into rivals, rivals into enemies, and differences into personal wars. It needs the farmer who does not ask for a hen to feed his children, but rather wishes for his neighbor's hen to die.

Freedom demands exactly the opposite. We should aspire for our neighbor to have ten chickens, for us to have twenty, and for the next person to have fifty. For a journalist to succeed and for others to learn from them. For an opposition member to receive an award and for others to rejoice in it. For a writer to publish a book and for 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.