In one of his classic epigrams, Antonio Machado said: “The eye that you see is not/an eye because you see it:/it is an eye because it sees you.”
Nothing conveys an impression closer to that feeling than a platoon of U.S., Irish and Australian students who have just arrived in Havana. The battery of questions that follows is only a pale sample of what the first session can turn out to be.
How do Cubans represent the images of Cuba and of themselves that foreigners have? What do they think of those images?
How can Cubans who have never visited the North know what the United States is like? How do they imagine the people there (not the government, but ordinary U.S. citizens)? What do they know about their lives?
What is the logical sense of the U.S. blockade against Cuba? What benefits does it bring them? Wouldn’t they benefit more if they exported to Cuba and imported Cuban products to the United States? Why does the blockade exist? What is its reason for being and for maintaining it?
What would be the response of the Cuban government, or eventually of intellectuals, if they heard the street discourse that puts “the blockade” in quotation marks? How would they respond to the idea that the blockade is a tool that the government uses to justify its failures and mistakes? Where does the idea that the U.S. blockade is nothing more than that come from?
What effect would the lifting of the blockade have on Cuba? Would relations be fully normalized? What would be the first perceptible change if the embargo were lifted overnight? Would young people stop emigrating?
What are Cuba’s relations with countries that are enemies of the United States; for example, China, Russia, North Korea? Why does the United States have more dialogue with these countries ― and even trade in some cases ― than with Cuba?
What are the differences between Cuba’s market policies and those of other communist countries like China, Vietnam, Laos? Are these still communist countries? And if they are, why doesn’t Cuba follow suit?
What changes would have to take place within Cuba to make it reach an agreement with the United States? To facilitate the two countries reaching an understanding.
Who’s turn is it to take the first step?
As the reader has noticed, each of these questions is enough to fill several pages. It would take them to answer the voracity of the questioners; not to mention to go through them in their entirety.
Foreign visitors, students, tourists, people who have read about Cuba, and have at least been curious enough to come, can be like guinea pigs, said with all due respect; that is, vectors with the necessary bacteria to check how we project ourselves in other mirrors.
I mean that it would be very difficult for us to distance ourselves from our own images and problems. It is like pretending that, when we look in the mirror, we see ourselves with the same face as when we walk distractedly down the street, daydreaming. As soon as we catch ourselves in the reflection, a self-correcting mechanism tends to recompose our features, to make us look like this or that face, just like when someone takes a photo of us. As great photographers of people know, the images that reveal who we are, are those that are taken of us inadvertently, or from an unexpected angle. That is when we reveal that identity of which we are almost never aware, and neither are others.
Although they are not without glass, the eyes of visitors are like experimental mirrors. They can distort the nature of things, as they are, or as we see them with our glasses, but they are not contaminated by the spectrum of light that we do not see. They can be contaminated, naturally, by all the other spectrums of light that they cannot see. And almost always, let’s say, they simplify the problems. But I say that it is easier for us to notice them, by that same simple way of formulating their questions. With the usefulness of opening the crack towards a problem that can be ― and often is ― much deeper.
It is not the same, of course, a student, a curious visitor, a reader of the news, a mind motivated by doubts, as a journalist with an editorial line asking questions that seek to demonstrate or give flesh to a series of anticipated or preconceived truths. Although those also have to be answered, they are another type of questioning, those of the local public. The ones I share here belong to the river of a conversation with students or visitors, in the privacy of a room, with coffee if possible.
Since there are many, I choose a handful, just to start.
Since when and why are Cubans who have never visited the United States already aware of everything, as if they lived there?
Anyone would say that we all have friends and relatives on that side, who keep us up to date on everything. Of course, listening to stories and anecdotes is not the same as waking up and working, settling down and raising a family, making a career and raising children; going for a walk is not the same as staying. Even before sharing photos and stories on WhatsApp, we have been convinced that we carry all the knowledge, the images, the elementary notions of the “American way of life,” whatever it may be. It is part of the package of being Cuban.
Beyond the multiple afferences of what’s American in our daily lives, that affinity has to do with our habits, tastes, customs, hobbies of all kinds, entertainment. We almost drink it in our mother’s milk. A strange mix of patriotism and admiration for the gadgets of modernity from there, for hamburgers and black beans, country music and trova, rum and whiskey, theirs and ours. Something quite strange, given that many continue to identify Cuba as “a communist country.”
According to this almost consanguineous image of our coexistence, it is this blockade that would ruin everything.
What would happen if it evaporated? Would our resentments end and would we find peace? Would we be mutually happy?
I have often imagined the effect if the end of the blockade, that partition that has been in place since the Missile Crisis, were to be eliminated overnight. How would we assimilate it, and what could be derived from that scenario, which would radically modify, from the start, the regime of relations between both shores.
We are talking about an unusual circumstance in more than 60 years. Neither ordinary Cubans nor those in the government have experienced what it is like to live in a country that is not blockaded. I belong to a minority capable of remembering what the island was like without the blockade and I know that this experience is meaningless for 90% of Cubans, those who live inside and outside.
The end of the blockade would cause greater exaltation than the announcement of the normalization of relations in 2014, since it would bring with it a fundamental change in circumstances and in our entire life. After an extraordinary jubilation, it would give way to a state of bewilderment, of disorientation. We would have to start living in other circumstances, with other reflexes. You would tell me that we would get used to it quickly, because one gets used to good things easily. Probably, but that would not erase the uncertainty. What could be done, and what could not yet be done. If we think about commercial relations, strictly speaking, it is not something as simple as trading; a set of additional regulations would have to be created. Even if this were the case, if the end of the blockade is seen as the path to a different relationship, it would be something else.
A post-blockade Cuba would be much more unpredictable than a post-Soviet Cuba. The attributes, features, and characteristics of the post-Soviet period were foretold in the changes in the ideological, political, economic, and cultural context of the end of Euro-Soviet socialism. The economic chaos, the disenchantment, the lack of vision for the future, the failure of the creed of socialism, were its logical derivations. The idea of socialism was able to survive then, culturally speaking, because the original of the Revolution had not emerged from the USSR.
We were able to adapt to the suspension of relations with the United States before, because it was part of an all-encompassing process of social transformation that occurred in the context of the transformation of social relations that was the Revolution. What would be the paths of a post-embargo Cuba? Let’s say, one that began to coexist with the United States without hostility, without antagonism.
The economic situation would improve, new prospects for development would open up. However, would Cubans, especially young people, stop emigrating? Perhaps not. The end of the blockade would strengthen relations, facilitate exchanges, intensify communication. Nothing that could, in itself, interrupt the flow of goods and services, as is happening now, much less of people. Quite the opposite.
You will tell me that this conversation has moved away from what can be seen through the window. And it is better not to think about the end of the blockade, which does not seem to be just around the corner. In any case, putting our feet on the ground entails, in addition to recognizing the reality of the blockade, paying attention to our newcomers when they ask why, despite its weight in Cuban life, there are many who call it “the blockade,” as if it were a fabrication.
A paradox of our internal politics, I would say, is that the way of putting the blockade as the root of our ills often achieves a counterproductive effect.
In addition to being recurrent, the argument of the blockade covers up too many other causes, due to its generalization to almost all spheres of social life. This comprehensive effect damages credibility. The measure of this deterioration is that it wears out even among the people most concerned with this blockade and who suffer most from its circumstances.
Appreciating it as a question of communicative technique or ability to explain is not enough. Seeing it as an ideological problem is not enough either. The argument of the blockade bounces off the skin of society, not only in its mind; and in the conditions in which its daily life takes place.
Let’s say that, at the end of the work day, when the face of the national economy is the family situation, not the macroeconomy or global problems, a long chain of associations would be required, when the refrigerator door is opened, to distinguish the blockade. To find it behind the emptiness of the shelves, the high prices, the collapse of wages, a veritable exercise of abstraction would be required.
Is it reasonable that the level of political consciousness reached or attainable, in such circumstances, would allow us to resist the gusts in daily life? Is it likely that this consciousness will be sustained in the crusade against the blockade, as if it were an epidemic installed among us? Is it realistic to compete against this wear and tear, based on the same argument? And while that does not happen, is it reasonable that the half-empty refrigerator continues to not see itself in the mirror of the blockade?
We will continue in the next class.
