When I was very young and undocumented, I spent the 1971-1972 academic year with a team from the University of Havana, led by Graziella Pogolotti, interviewing farmer families in Mataguá, then Las Villas. As good university students, we shared seminars on the methodology of surveys and interviews, with an updated bibliography that we had managed to come up with, as well as the findings of our research in that hilly town. We would go out every morning, on a horse that each one had been assigned, and we would sometimes return at dusk, after long conversations with the families, collected in notebooks, and then we began to study the subjects of our careers, but not before bathing and letting the animals graze.
It was only after months of living in direct contact and making rapport (as they say in sociological jargon) with those hospitable and talkative farmers, that we discovered that the between their first answers recorded in our notebooks and what they told us six months later there was a considerable difference. We learned that what they thought and felt, their concerns and motivations, and their final attitudes and decisions regarding joining the community project that the government projected in that place, lay buried under several layers in their heads. As we unraveled it, not only did we get to know more about them in terms of political organizations and apparatuses, but we also learned to understand them and, above all, something fundamental for young intellectuals like us: to identify with their problems, their hopes and their uncertainties.
To determine anticipations about the future, researchers use a wide variety of instruments. Psychology almost always prefers in-depth interviews and projective techniques, instead of concise questionnaires to mark with a cross. Sociology and Anthropology insert what subjects say in a framework of intricate variables and measurements about the social context. Instead of being limited to surveys on the intention to have children, Demography studies the cultural, economic and social factors that determine the reproduction cycles of the population. From there it draws growth forecasts, based more on those calculations than on the instantaneous effect of much-needed maternal care plans on the birth rate.
As is known, Americans have polls for everything. According to the Pew Research Institute, for example, in 2004, 60% of the population was against same-sex marriage. That pattern changed only 10 years ago, but it was not public opinion, but a Supreme Court ruling that recognized it throughout the country, barely five years ago. Despite everything, the vast majority of Republicans and Evangelical Protestants today have the same prejudices. The lesson seems to be that the polls reflect what street struggles conquer, and that those conquests can even change the law, but not so much civic culture, and even less the nature of power.
Surveys can be very useful for selling. I remember reading one in the 1970s, according to which the cause of disagreement in the couple, when they got up in the morning, was the use of the same razor. Although it was not derived that Gillette razors were the main cause of divorce, it did serve to sell female razors. In fact, such very sophisticated micro studies are in high demand in marketing. Thus it is possible to know, in advance, that it is better to present a new gasoline by saying that it “puts a tiger in your engine” than to affirm that “Smoky bear prefers it.” The same technique can be applied to selling candidates or forecasting their success.
In Cuba, on the contrary, there is no practice of frequently publishing opinion polls. I remember the exceptional announcement of an expert on authorized surveys, at the beginning of the Special Period, which revealed the very low estimated percentage of Cubans in favor of opening agricultural markets. I also remember the ironic comment of an old friend, who claimed that he had spoken to all of them every time he came to Cuba.
In the absence of polls, however, there is that little pollster of public opinion, with his particular crystal ball, which we all carry inside. In 2012, a distinguished Cuban professor in the United States told me that nothing was going to change in Cuba, since Fidel continued to govern. As proof, he said that all his friends on the island thought so. The networks have come to reinforce that feeling of certainty about the country’s consensus and its projection. Those who have a million friends on Facebook consider that they know more about “what Cubans think about the present and the future” than can be imagined by any hypothetical polling company. It doesn’t matter that 90% of the friends remain silent; that the likes or comments come from almost always the same ones, and that those opinions fit in their high school’s courtyard.
It would be very convenient if public opinion studies were carried out (and published), not just yes or no surveys, to determine what Cubans think about their present and future. Another thing would be to use them, naturally, for their predictive power. I wonder what Gallup would have found if it had done a survey in Cuba in 1969 on the certainty of producing 10,000,000 tons of sugar; in 1986, on the bonanza and perspective of relations with the USSR and their durability; in 2000, on the prospect of economic improvement; in 2015, on whether the opening of the embassies marked a normalization without setback with the U.S., and so on.
In the absence of surveys, we have had consultations, such as the one on the Guidelines in 2010, and especially the one on the draft of the new Constitution, in 2018. In that constitutional debate, the numbers showed that the most discussed topic had not been the redefinition of private ownership over the means of production, the legitimation of well-earned “individual prosperity” (wealth), the elimination of the reference to communism or other issues such as the space granted to human rights and the autonomy of municipalities, but rather to same-sex marriage . More exactly, the right of a same-sex couple to form a family, with all its attributes.
Although the consultation did not promote debate, the networks were aflame with the issue. I don’t aim to tell this story here or explain its causes. In the end, the problem of article 68 became that of articles 81-82, and these became part of a Chapter III, On Families, in the plural. It was announced that a new Family Code was necessary for everything to be implemented, and that it would be taken to public consultation and approval later. I know persons who voted “no” in the constitutional referendum or annulled their ballots writing in them that they disagreed with the new Constitution due to this change in the article on marriage, the lack of protection of animal rights, or another specific objection. Some even affirmed that the rights should not be approved, but that it was enough to enunciate them in laws. After two years of those public debates, how could the future of this controversial issue be conceived?
In terms of gender rights, each society has advanced along different routes, and not without formidable opposition. In the United States, as I pointed out, it was not a Congressional act, but a ruling of the Supreme Court, which imposed same-sex marriage on the various states that were reluctant to admit it. The Court had the originality, by the way, to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment, promulgated 150 years earlier, in the wake of the Civil War, and aimed at protecting the rights of emancipated slaves. Despite the mandatory nature of that law on same-sex marriage, current polls indicate that only 37% of Republican congresspersons support it.
As in the U.S., studies on the family in Cuba show that the practice of marriage is less frequent, that consensual union and divorce increase. Someone could say that people of sexual diversity are more interested in getting married than heterosexual people. Nor is it difficult to understand why: it is about gaining rights, unthinkable 30 years ago, not only to love each other in peace, but to create a family and all that this entails, in terms of children and common patrimony. If we step down from the rostrum and carefully read the new text of the Constitution, we could review the issue in an impartial way.
Article 81 recognizes the right of everyone to create a family, so it does not even have to be a couple. It identifies marriage only as “one of the forms of organization of families,” based on the “equality of rights, obligations and legal capacity of the spouses” (art. 82). As is known, the term spouse, like that of person, used by the constitutional draft (art. 63), is not sexed. It also recognizes “the stable and singular union with a legal attitude, which in fact forms a life project in common” and “generates the rights and obligations that it has” (art. 82). In short, considering that, according to the legal practice of other countries, the stable and singular union can be defined in terms equivalent to marriage, and that in many places it has preceded and even coexists with the recognition of equal marriage, this union constitutes a formula for a same-sex couple to legally head a family, under a new code.
In any case, subject to the legal variant that is proposed and validated, there are at least two substantive questions to think more about. One is that, whatever the option, the already approved constitutional framework legitimizes that one type of family can be headed by a same-sex couple. The second, proven in other national cases, is that no legal norm per se generates a change in mentality. This only arises from a debate of ideas, social and cultural development, and civic education, which is not equivalent to a simple campaign of moral literacy. No shortcut can save society from this process of transformation, which, of course, is not at stake only in political institutions, but above all within civil society.
I want to end the series of non-predictions with a note on that our domestic factor, called relations with the United States. If these depended on something like public opinion, they have long been on track, since most Americans, including those from Florida, as well as Cubans here and there, favor them. In fact, some of us initially had the expectation that Donald Trump, a businessman turned politician with no other ideology than profit, an outsider in the electoral management of the Republican Party, interested in doing business with “Castro’s Cuba,” without historical ties to the Cuban Neanderthal exile, defiant of the Washington establishment, was going to make an advance, in his own way, in the Cuba policy. We even jokingly suggested that the Habana Libre Tryp could become the Habana Libre Trump hotel. In fact, the scenario of a Republican reaching an understanding with a “communist country” had illustrious antecedents: Nixon and Kissinger with Mao’s People’s Republic of China; Reagan and Bush Sr. with Gorbachev’s USSR, former prisoner of war John McCain with Vietnam. Not forgetting that Ford and Kissinger were the initiators, before Jimmy Carter, of the detente with Cuba in 1974. Despite Trump’s provocative rhetoric, the same Cuban government made the concession to remain silent for several months, pending facts, not just tweets. All that expectation collapsed in the summer of 2017.
Now we hear forecasts like “it all depends on who wins the election” or “Trump must lose, but he can win; Biden must win, but he can lose.” As Mario Moreno and my other Mexican political science teachers would say, this is called uncertainty. Naturally, no survey, no matter how well done, provides sufficient evidence or substitutes for analysis of the political situation. So?
Given that electoral picture, which affects not only Cubans, but humanity, we could celebrate Biden’s eventual victory almost like another December 17th. The return to relations and, above all, their continuity would depend, however, on many factors: the importance of Cuba in the foreign agenda of the new administration, the evolution of the Venezuelan crisis, the specific interest in cooperating in emerging areas for security (such as health), the recovery of tourism and the facilities granted to U.S. companies.
What could Cuba do? In a previous series, I noted down some of the concessions made to the U.S. as part of the negotiating climate: no demand to lift the main parts of the blockade, Obama’s unilateral visit, U.S. airlines’ monopoly on travel, and especially, confidence in the continuity of normalization. Millions of optimistic Cubans, on this and the other shore, shared that confidence. If the COVID-19 crisis, in the process of promoting reforms, has been disconnected from relations with the U.S., its effects in the medium and long term could contribute to making those relations more fluid.
Since poll experts acknowledge that Trump “can win,” it’s not necessary to become a catastrophist to examine that scenario, however hateful or irrational it may seem. In politics, as in theater, the irrational and the catastrophic have some raison d’être. Let’s say, how is it explained that more than 60% of Cuban Americans in Dade County are going to vote for Trump? Are they the same 552 895 who came to visit last year? Is it reasonable to answer a survey saying that one favors postal service and remittances, and at the same time, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they bombed Cuba?
This subject, obsessive for us, is somewhat micro in the U.S. context, since Biden’s margin of advantage in that same county, where other voters live, now widely favors the Democrats.
In any case, what is different in this damn even year, typically electoral, is not what is going to happen to us, how those Cuban Americans will vote, who will take the lead in Florida, and much less if any of the candidates would embody “the reorganization of the system.” What is different is the rising wave of hostility and violence that accompanies it. The Republican president, branded as a mythomaniac, but highly skilled at political poker, raises fear with a terrorism that appeals to the most instinctive of the American people: the communists are not at the doors, but within the city, competing for the presidency. If anyone doubts it, let them see the looting and the dead in the streets…. So things are bad. His marketing consists of deepening an instability that forces people to vote for the known bad.
I’m unable to estimate how horribly Americans will vote in this election. A few months ago, my expert friends knew the exact day they would occur, November 3, and they corrected my shot; not even that anymore. Hopefully, with the date of the electoral photo finish, they would give me back the certainty about a long-awaited political outcome. Beyond catastrophisms and geopolitical fatalities, predictions and polls played by ear, the Cuban government doesn’t seem to put a single egg in the basket of uncertain relations, especially in the critical months to come.
In any case, what awaits us on this island on terra firma, which some melancholic friends mistake for a cage of water and sun, will depend more on what we do here, and less on the front page of The New York Times.
Authors
Rafael Hernández,
rafael_hernandez
Let’s start by publishing the surveys by Opinion del Pueblo.