Among the means of political communication in pre-revolutionary France, above the books and speeches of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the traveling plays and the lyrics of popular ballads, there were little pieces of paper that could be read in the palm of the hand, and for that very reason called palme-feuillets (in English, pamphlet and from there to panfleto in Spanish), which circulated outside official control, more instantaneous and accessible than books and rags.
Between the revolutions unleashed in 1930 and 1953, Cuba had the radio as the main means of political communication. The program of Eduardo Chibás, leader of Orthodoxy, on CMQ Radio, captured the audience of practically all Cubans every Sunday night. Cuba then had more radio sets than Argentina or Brazil, countries infinitely larger and more populated than the island. Chibás had announced that he would soon take the space to television, which was already starting in Cuba at that time. I can’t imagine what his shocking suicide, broadcast on that same Sunday radio show, would have been like if it had happened live on camera.
When Fidel Castro began to speak on television, he did not replicate what other politicians did on programs such as Ante la prensa; in official harangues such as that of Otto Meruelos, spokesperson for the Batista regime; or in humanitarian crusades, like that of Father Ismael Testé. Closer to Chibás, but with the enormous influence of a leadership that had come to power, Fidel began to do politics on television, before John F. Kennedy himself, the first U.S. politician to be recognized as having taken advantage of that means since the 1960 electoral campaign. It would be difficult to exaggerate the reach and effect of that Fidel, who used TV to exercise his leadership, practice political education, ideological debate, and public decision-making, during speeches that lasted until dawn; when illustrious figures who did not share his revolutionary platform, such as Jorge Mañach, wrote in admiration of what they called “Fidel’s angel” in reference to those television sessions.
Of course, the French Revolution was not caused by those pamphlets passed from hand to hand; not even the establishment of a platform like “Shame versus Money,” amid citizen frustration and the credibility crisis of the parties, was the work of that Sunday program; nor can the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s leadership be explained by his effective handling of an electronic means brought from the United States and used to sell things.
Not going that far and the different historical moments, digital media, with all their significance, are not the key to the changes in today’s Cuban transition. Since the 1990s, the growing differentiation and diversity between social groups, the heterogeneity of political consensus, new attitudes and behaviors regarding the State and its institutions, the normalization of expressions of dissent that previously implied frontal opposition, the topic of disenchantment in art and literature, the rampant increase in emigration, the generational change in leadership, the public debates on the most important documents and laws, the open questioning of policies by the people, all of this was there long before the Internet extended to mobile data.
Also there, by the way, was the debate on the need for the government to adopt new information and communication technologies, preceding each measure adopted to expand email, extend the Internet beyond institutions, open public spaces with Wi-Fi (the “sidewalk Internet”), offer the service as part of domestic telephony (Nauta Hogar), advance in collaboration with foreign telephone and digital companies.
It is not surprising that this development has been characterized by contradictions, delays, zigzags, and by having to overcome resistance associated with an unknown media, with implications for national security around the world. This control not only affects access to platforms such as Google, Facebook, X (former Twitter), Instagram, in countries such as China and Vietnam; but also determines that security agencies everywhere monitor what happens on social media.
This challenge, and the policies that have accompanied it, have evolved throughout this last decade. To illustrate this, I will use a conversation with a journalist, published in the form of an interview ten years ago, which led me to reason about some shared problems in that circumstance of ours.
I began by pointing out the main political change in terms of communication, which for me was the defusing of the inside/outside dividing line. This change did not depend on everyone, or even the majority, being connected to the Internet (as is the case now), but on the residents of the island maintaining lots of capillaries with that “outside,” leaving and entering, interacting here with almost 3 million visitors, they had relatives and friends abroad, they could use email, which had millions of accounts. That is to say, they were not in a cave guessing what was happening outside as some elsewhere believed, and sometimes still believe.
Already then, a musician’s political statements during a live performance reached an instant echo beyond borders, reflecting the new extension and conductivity of the public sphere. Events like that had a rebound effect (outside and inside), whose impact included those who were not watching TV in Cuba or had an Internet connection.
Remembering that circumstance, it comes to mind that six years earlier, in 2007, a simple exchange of emails between a group of writers and artists, later called “the little email war,” had overflowed in a matter of days, leading to the Cultural authorities rushing to organize a series of debates to air this situation.
Without social media or cell phones, I remember hundreds of interested parties protesting because they were not allowed to enter to witness those debate sessions. That reaction was a clear sign of the new times. Events like these demonstrated that the pressure of society, or even a very small part of it, was already — and would increasingly be — an efficient cause for changes.
In that conversation, I told my interviewer that all the “costs” or “dangers” (that the old mentality attributed to the Internet) were already there, qualitatively speaking, even though the majority of Cubans did not have a connection at home. And they showed that a restrictive policy on the use of digital media closed the possibility of the recognizable advantages of this new communication technology being taken advantage of by society as a whole.
It was obvious from then on that if politics did not organize the public space, other channels, formal and informal, would prevail, which, politically speaking, were more costly in the long run. The principle was the same as the propagation of gases: the void is filled by “something else.”
In my political reading of ICTs, of which I declared myself an apprentice, the main challenge for Cuban leaders was not to tune in to digital media, but above all to the existence of the new social and cultural fabric that pulsed in that expanded public sphere. And in becoming aware that, in the conditions of this new fabric, the ideological vibrators were no longer contained, obviously, in the political discourse of the institutions and the ideological apparatuses of the State, but had diversified and decentralized.
Given the multiple tracks of the reproduction of ideology, this challenge required becoming aware that the new situation was not reduced to an economic crisis or the politicization of a specific social sector, which suddenly became “problematic.” If this had been the case, it would have been an easily treatable “deviation.”
According to my modest insights into the political problem at stake, leaders should not limit themselves to accepting the Internet as a fatality of the modern world, a kind of necessary evil; or adopt it as a new “weapon of ideological struggle,” but rather change their attitude towards dissent, towards a political consensus that was already different, heterogeneous, contradictory, of which it formed part as a natural ingredient, encompassing the most diverse social groups.
Cuban politics seemed to me to be forced to realize that it was normal — to put it with a metaphor — for flies to fly without a pre-established script, and above all, that it was not a good idea to try to kill them with cannon fire. After all, they were our flies, not a plague sent by the enemy (in which case cannon shots were not very useful either).
To end our conversation, ten years ago, I remember that the journalist asked me what was obvious: “According to how the transformations in Cuba are planned since the 6th Congress of the PCC [2011], do you think there is a comprehensive understanding about the information-innovation-communication-power relationship?”
I tried to respond with a kind of meditation, which could well extend to today, as the reader may have gathered while reading the previous paragraphs. Having dealt with institutions in the government and the Party for a good part of my life, I told her that we used to refer to “politicians” as a bloc when in truth they were many people, among whom there were those with ways of thinking similar to those of other citizens, including a clearer notion of ICTs.
I dared to affirm that at no previous time had we had a high-ranking leadership capable of better dealing with the information-innovation-communication-power relationship. However, the inertia of a decades-old political style still weighed heavily. Whatever their professions, the new generations of leaders had been raised in that style, corresponding to what Raúl called the “old mentality.” That is, they shared a certain culture of politics reproduced throughout generations.
The speeches of that old mentality — regardless of the age of the speakers — not only reflected immobility, but also little capacity to reproduce the hegemony that had characterized the process. The big question — I said — was not to repair the hegemony of an aging socialism, but to reconstruct its political culture, with a new practice that included all technological advances.
That conversation that I excavated in the fog of a decade ago, abusing the patience of the reader and the space of this column, came to mind when I learned that a Law on Digital Transformation of the country, and a new government portal would be coming out of the oven in a few days.
Of course, nothing noted above should be understood as an underestimation of this instrument that science and technology have placed in our hands, quite the opposite. The possibilities of electronic government, of platforms such as Telegram and others, equipped with countless resources to transmit messages, images, videos, data, record events in full development, produce news and information for public use, are extraordinary. At the same time, we must get over the fetishism of technology, which, in the words of the great historian Arnold Toynbee in The World and the West, is nothing more than a long Greek word for a bag of tools.
So managing digital media to carry out political communication is not a matter of publishing tweets, taking selfies, and recording streamings, but of rethinking the strategic conceptions of communication with a radically new style, understood as interaction, as a round trip, which implies learning to listen and think with others, both leaders and citizens.
This practice had to go beyond that old division of labor that prescribed politicians as those who had the task of representing the people; just as it assigned intellectuals the role of bearers of critical consciousness. The great challenge for both, ten years ago and now, is to train leaders who are increasingly intellectually gifted and capable of dialogue; and intellectuals with greater mastery of political problems.
Otherwise, we would continue to reproduce the old dichotomy, between power and thought, culture and political reason, which Max Weber had already characterized, and which today translates into the stereotypes of authoritarians and snipers. These roles and their paradigms have contributed little to a culture of socialism, to the training of leaders and intellectuals capable of interacting with each other, but above all with citizens, and who do not grow on their own like palm nuts.
Digital transformation requires, in addition to overcoming the predominance of honeypots on social media, connecting the islands of social, cultural, educational, scientific, and political institutions, as well as linking them with publications, spaces for reflection, blogs, areas of civil society, inside and outside, horizontally, not hierarchically. Although it is necessary to learn to use the devices, the most difficult part of this transformation is building a vision that prevails over the inherited sectoral feudalism and verticalism.
Without illusions, with our feet on the ground, but with a compass; walking and correcting the course, because if it is true that “there is no science of socialism,” today more than ever “the educator needs to be educated.” Up and down.
Author
Rafael Hernández
