{"id":290000,"date":"2023-10-12T19:24:43","date_gmt":"2023-10-12T23:24:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=290000"},"modified":"2023-10-14T14:33:08","modified_gmt":"2023-10-14T18:33:08","slug":"nation-and-emigration-the-shores-of-dialogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/in-plain-words\/nation-and-emigration-the-shores-of-dialogue\/","title":{"rendered":"Nation and Emigration: The shores of dialogue"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I teach the history of the Revolution, the problem to be solved is not the \u201cbanned books\u201d by emigrated authors; say, Jorge Dom\u00ednguez, Emilio Cueto, Uva de Arag\u00f3n, Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Ada Ferrer, Alejandro de la Fuente, Jorge Duany, Lisandro P\u00e9rez, Guillermo Grenier, Alan West-Duran, Iraida L\u00f3pez, Ruth Behar, Miren Uriarte, Alejandro Portes, Roberto Gonz\u00e1lez Echeverr\u00eda, to mention only a few who are alive, among many. Although the majority do not share the ideology of Cuban socialism, they are known, cited, commented, used in classes, and almost all of them published here.<\/span><\/p>\n

The great current paradox, however, is that accessing documents, recordings, key speeches of our leaders, especially the so-called historical ones, is much more difficult than those of these emigrated authors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last week, during a three-part debate on counterpoints in the field of art and literature, under the umbrella of <\/span>Temas<\/span><\/i> and the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), the filmmaker Manuel P\u00e9rez recalled Fidel\u2019s speech at the 1971 Congress of Education and Culture, in which he had defended the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinema Industry (ICAIC) policy against those who tried to drag it into the canons of socialist realism. Manolo, with his memory of fly paper (Roa dixit) and his lucid passion intact at the age of 84, evoked precisely the words of that foreign minister with whom he shared the table in a Commission of the aforementioned Congress when he had whispered to him: \u201cYou can already leave calmly, ICAIC has been saved.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

How many articles, essays, books that address the cultural policies and political cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, including the infamous Gray Quinquennium, have been written without knowing the intra-history of events such as the Padilla case, the cultural congresses of 1968 and 1971, the ins and outs of the Critical Thinking affair, the struggles that led to the founding of the Ministry of Culture, the recovery of many works of writers and artists who left. How much literature that continues to play by ear (and only one ear) passes by the wealth of live events, data, documents, letters, reports, photos, old notebooks, which carries on its back \u2014 that is to say \u2014 that living fountain that we affectionately call Manolo P\u00e9rez.<\/span><\/p>\n

A film scriptwriter would say that it is a factory of plots and subplots, where contingencies are linked to characters and events of the process \u2014 political, social, ideological \u2014 and its contradictions, some formidable; more similar to a Balzac novel than to the quota of patron saints and anniversaries that students and spectators face every day. Or the cloud of gases that spread on the networks, disguised as alternative truths. Well, among the issues that should be dusted off from so much occultism and ideological dust is that of dialogue with the emigrants.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is enough to access the archived documents, a minimal part declassified, to glimpse the many shores of this plot. Which continues to be evoked only as a kind of television series whose chapters throughout forty-five years are limited to the same characters, to those same photos, in one of those linear chronologies that try to demonstrate the perfect continuity of politics, instead of a critical story.<\/span><\/p>\n

Basing myself on what has been brought to light, I want to argue why the meeting called The Nation and Emigration, which is just around the corner in three weeks, should not be understood as another season in that TV series.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first thing is that, as an area of Cuban politics, this is one of those (few) topics of which it can be said that \u201cnevertheless, it moves.\u201d In this case, the crests of the iceberg are visible to anyone who wants to see them.<\/span><\/p>\n

New regulations that make <\/span>passport<\/b><\/a> renewal more flexible, customs changes to facilitate <\/span>shipments and imports of medicines and food<\/b><\/a>, meetings of some entrepreneurs with authorities on the island, and most especially, talks at the level of the president and emigrated businesspeople about the \u2014 much talked about \u2014 real space to invest in Cuba. The unusual event, in Miami, with the participation of numerous private entrepreneurs from here and others from there, is the latest notable event.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of this happens as a result of concurrent chance or the fluctuations of the situation, but rather of the larger political context in which it takes place, including the relations between the two governments. I want to start by discussing how connecting with previous moments helps us understand and compare it.<\/span><\/p>\n

What would later be called the dialogue with the Cuban community abroad was an initiative from here and, like almost everything important, it did not appear in the newspapers (\u201cit had to be in silence,\u201d Mart\u00ed said). It was an action of double metadiplomacy: it did not involve diplomats, but rather intelligence agents; and the main interlocutors on the other side were not proxies for government agencies (like the famous lawyer James Donovan), but real leaders of the Cuban-American business elite.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the time <\/span>Bernardo Benes and Fidel Castro<\/b><\/a> sat down to agree on the smallest aspects of the dialogue agenda, the banker had long had the green light from the CIA, and President Carter knew what was happening.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Bill Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh\u2019s extensive documents and sources in their magnum opus <\/span>Back Channel to Cuba<\/span><\/i>, once the U.S. government agencies \u2014 especially the National Security Council (NSC) and the State Department \u2014 read the Cuban signals to advance in the official dialogue with the Carter administration, they started going around Benes and the other emigration leaders. That was the end of the role of brokers that they proposed to play. Of course, they were not going to sit at the negotiating table, because it was not their turn.<\/span><\/p>\n

For their part, Cuban negotiators realized that the banker\u2019s good intentions went beyond the real scope of U.S. policy towards Cuba, whose goal then was not so much to promote \u201chuman rights\u201d as to get Cuba out of Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, on this side, the meta-diplomatic channel with which Cuba from the outside remained open, and directed towards new results.<\/span><\/p>\n

That negotiation between Fidel and members of the Cuban-American business elite that began in August 1977 would stage, fifteen months later, the meeting of the 75 representatives of a very diverse emigration with the Cuban government top brass in Havana.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that interim, there would be two public meetings. One (January 1978) with the daring left of young emigrated intellectuals, who had dared to found a magazine and defend the Revolution in the most adverse circumstances possible, literally risking their lives. The other, with emigrated journalists (September 1978), on the eve of the public meeting. In that same period, more than a dozen secret meetings occurred, which set the pace of the event\u2019s agenda.<\/span><\/p>\n

The main topics that, from the beginning of the dialogue, the emigration leaders brought up were summarized in three: family reunification, return (that is, visits to the island) and release of political prisoners.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the Cuban side, Fidel was favorably disposed toward all three, starting with the one that seemed most difficult: that of the prisoners. There were 3,600 who were serving long sentences, none of which were for protesting, speaking or writing against the Revolution, but for violent actions that dated back to the height of armed subversion and civil war.<\/span><\/p>\n

This initial disposition, aimed at promoting a new relationship with the United States, led to the opening of stable diplomatic channels between the two governments to discuss the greater agenda.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cuba\u2019s signals responded to a political logic that was not negotiating for the sake of negotiating. They were based on a comprehensive and binding negotiation process, which instead of separate topics, included the most burning of its foreign relations, such as Africa; but as long as the United States walked equally in relation to the blockade, shut down terrorism, renounced prior conditioning and double standards. That negotiating strategy was not like a five-year plan of guidelines, but rather like a game of chess, subject to how the game progressed.<\/span><\/p>\n

To appreciate the logic of that Cuban moment, you have to understand the national and international context. Inside, the country had emerged from the crisis, the promise of well-being with equality had been consolidated, and a political system institutionalized and ordered by a new constitution was taking off. Externally, although its alliance with the USSR had been strengthened, Cuban foreign policy was not that of a Moscow satellite, neither in Africa, nor in Latin America, nor in the context of the Non-Aligned countries, in which its leadership was recognized. For Cuban politics, let\u2019s say, it was a moment of consensus and strength.<\/span><\/p>\n

That said, the situation of relations with emigrants was not so easy to process internally. Although the motto of the First Congress of the Communist Party, in 1975, was \u201cMen die, the Party is immortal,\u201d the political power of the government and the Party, institutions with a role very similar to that of today, was not comparable to that of that leadership. So when the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) and the government made Fidel aware of the effect of confusion that the unexpected political mess with the community and the Americans was causing in the people, he would have to resort to his moral authority and political reason to handle the situation. He could do it, and he knew how. Up to a certain point.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fresh in everyone\u2019s memory were the terrorist attack on the coastal town of <\/span>Boca de Sam\u00e1<\/b><\/a> (1971), the <\/span>murder of Cuban fishermen<\/b><\/a> (1973), the strange epidemics of <\/span>swine fever<\/b><\/a> (1971), <\/span>tobacco blue mold<\/b><\/a> (1978), sugarcane rust (1978, the impunity with which terrorist organizations such as <\/span>Omega 7<\/b><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Alpha 66<\/b><\/a>, whose headquarters were based in Miami, operated. Just two years earlier, a Cuban plane with more than 70 civilians on board <\/span>had been sabotaged<\/b><\/a> by a terrorist commando belonging to an organization of that barbaric exile, which had planned and executed it. Fidel himself, when he gave the speech for the mourning of the dead in Barbados, had pointed to their headquarters in Miami as those directly responsible for the action, and blamed the national security agencies of the United States for letting them do it, denouncing, in protest, the treaty on airplane hijackings signed shortly before between both governments (1973).<\/span><\/p>\n

So when he decided to meet with several thousand PCC members at the Karl Marx Theater to explain his new policy towards emigrants, in 1978, he had to work hard for six hours.<\/span><\/p>\n

In\u00a0<\/span>this column<\/b><\/a>, I have glossed over what is known about that speech, whose fragments of a very long intervention were published just three years ago as part of a book printed outside of Cuba. Since almost no one even knows these published pieces, I return to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

These explanations to the Party members occurred almost three months after the first meeting of the dialogue with the emigrants in November 1978. As far as we know, in them, Fidel pronounced several concepts that today we could consider strategic. To paraphrase, this is what he said in February 1979.<\/span><\/p>\n

The link of the majority of that community with Cuba has a national (non-ideological) component, which by its very nature is related to the idea of change, and progress, that is, it is closer to the Revolution than to the conservative ingredient of the counterrevolution. Even among those who do not share the socialist ideal, Cuban political culture is more similar to what the Revolution has rescued as a national legacy. So, due to this historical gravitation, this emigration is called to defend the national interest, over any other.<\/span><\/p>\n

We have become accustomed to a combat policy, because it has been imposed on us, but also because \u201cit arouses emotions\u201d related to heroism, especially \u201camong ardent and passionate temperaments.\u201d So a policy of peace is much more difficult to build and prevail. Coexisting with capitalism, and negotiating with it, costs us much more work.<\/span><\/p>\n

The historical strategy of the Cuban Revolution has been, since before the triumph, to win over the adversaries. To not morally despise the enemy, nor judge him to be a coward. So \u201cmany Batista soldiers are today members of our Party,\u201d \u201cvanguard workers, distinguished workers.\u201d The Revolution consists of a process of transformation of human beings, based on their virtues and moral capacities, from which \u201cthey can become a revolutionary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The strategic lesson about unity is that it applies to adversaries, not to those who think like us. It is about attracting them so that \u201cin one way or another, they serve the Revolution.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, the great lesson that is derived from this unitary strategy is that ideological purity is not revolutionary, because in a state of asepsis, in a vacuum chamber, where there is \u201cnot the slightest temptation, nor the slightest contact,\u201d nothing is proven. \u201cA revolutionary cannot fear ideological contact, confrontation.\u201d Believing that this implies \u201cgetting muddy\u201d is a mistake. On the contrary: only contact and coexistence can make revolutionary virtues shine, be tested, and aspire to a certain purity that is legitimate.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose it is obvious at this point in the game that the next chapter of this dialogue occurs at a historical moment that Fidel Castro himself would have described as very different. However, we can learn something from this review of the past.<\/span><\/p>\n

What do the forty-five years that have passed since the first dialogue teach us? To what extent do current circumstances, here and abroad, favor a political dialogue that converges in the national interest? How to define this interest, according to strategic objectives, that is not restricted by ideological differences? Where does a democratic, patriotic, pluralistic representation of the national condition end, different from the banal relativism of \u201cwe are all Cubans\u201d? What foundations can we lay for a social and political pact of Cubans from here and there that does not remain in goodwill, codes, short-term economic motives, signed papers? What spaces are there here for those who are outside, and how to combine them with those of those who are here? How can we imagine defending the national interest among all? How can we ensure that this nation project inside and outside does not remain in meetings, but rather is articulated in the social and political order of this nation? So that it is not exposed to the ups and downs of relations with the United States?<\/span><\/p>\n

Reconciliation between families, and the agreement of our disagreements, as well as dialogues in the fields of culture, academia, science, and faith, contain lessons that we should share, so as not to trip over the same stones again.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The next chapter of this dialogue occurs in a historical moment that Fidel Castro himself would have described as very different. However, we can learn something from the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3343,"featured_media":290002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13944,34473],"tags":[14891,19256],"ppma_author":[34051],"class_list":["post-290000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cuba-usa","category-in-plain-words","tag-cuba-usa-relations","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNation and Emigration: The shores of dialogue | OnCubaNews English<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The next chapter of this dialogue occurs in a historical moment that Fidel Castro himself would have described as very different. 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