Cuba matters less than what happens with Cuba and with minds about a debate that – far beyond our small territory – encompasses oppositions such as those that are verified (for any subject and / or territory) between its own nation and a foreign nation , memory and forgetfulness, individualism and collective subject, hegemony and independence, sovereignty and regression, unity and disintegration, logics of hatred and resistance. That’s what blocking is all about
Author: Victor Fowler Calzada | internet@granma.cu
May 9, 2021 20:05:46
1. According to the document entitled Economic Sanctions, Agencies Face Competing Priorities in Enforcing the U.S. Embargo on Cuba (published in November 2007 by the United States Government Accountability Office), the embargo is: «the most extensive set of United States sanctions against any country, including the rest of the countries designated by the United States government as states sponsors of terrorism.
This note of pride, coming from an official dependency of the Government of the nation with the greatest economic power in all times of human existence, a country that in many productive and / or financial spheres worldwide shows decisive control ( and on other occasions dominant, and even overwhelming) is enough to make evident the enormous dissimilarity and immense asymmetry between the Cuban country / social system and its aggressive opponent. I will try to explain how I understand, accommodate, handle, have gone through, survive, think, love, breathe, believe inside this habitual violence.
2. The blockade / embargo is possible thanks to the monstrously asymmetric relationship between its organizer / leader and its recipient / sufferer, a difference so disproportionate that it makes no sense to imagine any condition of equality or close to the balance of possibilities between the Cuban country and its “Blocker” in economic and military terms, access to mass media and digital networks and, in general, to all points of the cultural industry.
For this reason, it is practically impossible for any aspect of our lives to escape or be immune to its presence or pressure, be it development projects or discussions of a spiritual nature; This happens because the embargo / blockade affects, compromises, deforms, diminishes, lacerates, pollutes, prevents any possibility of access to resources that the country can enjoy under conditions of «normality» (and not under the exception of the «sanctioned», marked, excluded, persecuted, forced to abide by unique rules).
3. This has just been said allows us to imagine the fabric / network of the blockade / embargo as an intertwining of force flows that, by far (in reality, almost immeasurably) exceeds economic sanctions.
Although we must understand the latter as decisions of political estates in the government apparatuses in question, this, which we call «political decisions», cannot be separated from the derivations and descending refraction of the political discourse / law in an infinity of actions of all kinds that intend to injure, degrade, manipulate, lie, hide, pour hatred regarding whatever means success, benefit, unity or simple tranquility within the space / time of the Cuban Revolution.
4. The vision of a downward movement (as the steps are lowered in a staircase), added to that of a set of derivations from a central body and, finally, that of a refraction (as happens with light by going through a prism) they help us to understand the embargo / blockade as a great hard core, where political dictates are immediately translated into laws and, from here, refracted, divided, splintered, in the widest conceivable number of threats , obligations and calls to hatred in each and every one of life’s scenarios.
In this sense, the embargo / blockade must be understood as a huge push of force exerted downwards from the very pinnacle of power, a savage pressure that in its closest perimeter (the nation) hits, drags, damages or changes the destinies to those who oppose him.
5. If the type of economic laceration that the embargo / blockade favors aims to hinder, deform, impede or destroy any development (of whatever type: productive, scientific, cultural, sports, industrial, agricultural, etc.) that may be generated within Cuban socialism, its collateral effects intoxicate the notions of solidarity, brotherhood, family, friendship between Cubans in the country and their compatriots in the world.
The foregoing occurs not because an emigrant must choose whether or not to help family members and / or friends who suffer the effects of the embargo / blockade in Cuba (even if he considers that, rather, there are errors and failures of the Government), but exactly because the implicit ideological proposal of the embargo / blockade is to extend the fusion of the ideological-cultural patterns of individual salvation, the demonization of collectivist solutions, the disappearance of authentic empathy and the invisibility of the embargo / blockade as such.
In this way, it is possible to send money to a chosen family member, applaud the embargo / blockade or the politicians who advocate it, and believe that it is still fair and defender of the people who live in the country.
6. At the same time as the absence of empathy, the embargo / blockade masks (and promotes) a sense of naturalness that aims to convey the (terrible) message that the kind of absolute exceptionality that constitutes the extension, will to globalization and intensification of such a policy for almost six decades is “normal.”
In this way, while a country and its people inhabit a situation that it cannot even be compared or balanced with any other in contemporary times, a paradoxical reality for which (strictly speaking) there are not even tools with which to carry out the analyzes. What is it to live this way? How are development projects designed? What is hope, fulfillment, plans to start a family, raise children? With what reality could the Cuban reality be compared?
7. We can unravel the impediments to development thanks to the obvious that they are (due to the openness and totality), scenes such as those that include refusals to the granting of credits, the persecution of a purchase made by Cuban foreign trade institutions or the fines to banks that accept to transfer money to the Island, among many other possibilities.
Thus, while the brutality of a chain of rejections encourages the birth of mentalities educated to resist pressures in conditions of survival (being convinced that there will not be this or that) and the most widespread creativity (in a situation in which to invent is to continue to be alive), the introduction into the economy of the precarious, the intermittent, the casual, the random and / or discontinuous, distorts projects and remains “seeded” (doing a kind of work of structural weakening), waiting for hatch / explode at some future time.
8. At the same time that the energy of change and the transformations within the space / time of the Cuban Revolution are great (to the point of leading us to see being / being in resistance as something normal), the blockade / embargo exists and its effects they operate on the absolute of Cuban national life.
By operating 365 days a year, in all centimeters of the national geography and for all citizens, it is a continuum, a network or tissue that (like a living organism) grows towards the closure of its plot; that is to say, with the desire to completely cover the organism / country that it is desired to encapsulate and, consequently, suffocate.
Regarding its effects, these are experienced in three temporal dimensions simultaneously: it is in the collective memory of the country (so that it is a defining element in the life histories of all nationals), it is a present reality (directly linked to the chances of better / worse people’s lives) and it constitutes a central part in the horizon of expectations of all the inhabitants (both the intensification of the blockade / embargo and its attenuation and / or disappearance would completely change the immediate quality of life and / or the personal projects of all Cubans).
9. Although the blockade / embargo arises at a precise moment (the year 1962) with the basic intention of preventing any imaginable development within the Cuban Revolution, as well as reversing the transformations that it brings with it, the fulfillment of this objective it is inseparable from the return to the conditions of economic, military, political subordination and openness to the cultural penetration of Cuba with respect to the wills of the US political-economic elites.
In this sense, it is a clear expression of imperial hegemony and voracity disguised (and thus presented by the aforementioned elites and their ideologues) as a dispute between two countries that takes place on large international stages, in the manner of suprastructural fencing, with hardly any resonance for the quality of life, dreams and projects of ordinary citizens of the Island. This dissociation between the violence of the speeches, their articulation in concrete operations to destroy the economic life of the Island and any sense of “normality” on the ground That is, plus the distancing or inability to feel the extent and depth of the damage caused to ordinary people, illustrates the essentially sociopathic condition of those who developed this policy, those who have reactivated it over the years, who support it and applaud in a public way and, even, in the most bitter of cases, of those who do not denounce it and do not oppose it in any of the as imaginable varieties of public space or that may have a palpable impact on it.
10. What we judge from the perspective of small individual lives must be projected onto the global stage to help us understand the way in which the embargo / blockade is organized all the time as an international device that – on the basis of a tension between pressure and obedience – it aims to absorb, reformulate, deter, squash, divert, punish any attempt to establish “normal” relations with Cuba.
At the same time that in our country all lives are affected by the embargo / blockade, the same happens with those of all those who – outside the Island – support causes in favor of the Cuban Revolution or, simply, oppose the embargo; This difficult-to-notice truth becomes more transparent as we get closer to the “hard nuclei” of broadcasting messages and making policies against the Cuban socialist project.
In these environments of ideological-political toxicity, the articulated public defense of the Cuban revolutionary project carries risks (the more intense the positioning) that the subjects experience in terms of promotion and, in general, present and / or future opportunities for realization. .
The key here is in the identification, with a sign of equality, between the government policies on the Island or the way of life of its citizens, with the stigma and negative content associated with the socialist ideology; thus, the degradation of the “socialist thing” (as the absolute opposite) functions as a curtain that acts as an impediment to the unfolding of the revolutionary anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and third world transformative potential of the Revolution.
11. Politicians, ideologues and defenders of the blockade need to erase, hide or reduce its anti-human and destructive sense for the entire community; For this reason, they must spread the idea that their actions are, above all, exclusively political gestures with no real effect (some type of appreciable damage) for the daily life of the people in the country.
This refusal to recognize and accept the capacity to lacerate that one possesses and puts into practice (with all the recognition of the damage that is caused), as if accepting it would lead the person to a point of disintegration, illustrates the perverse character of an act ( the embargo / blockade) that you need to hide behind an original lie to avoid questions about detachment, pain and self inhumanity.
The above explains the repeated practice of taking any isolated and strictly punctual event (for example, the photograph of a product, in a store) to – without accompanying the image of comments that allow us to deepen – to give the feeling that there is no embargo / blockage Rather, it is a maneuver “of the Government” (for whatever obscure objective that speeches of this type may conceive).
The tasks of elucubration, implantation, maintenance, correction of errors and intensification of the embargo / blockade succeed, complement and fuse the same as a transnational mechanism (as we already know) in a dialectical articulation that cannot but, at the same time, construct at the same time. subject who persecutes and offers hatred the same as the other who receives violence.
This construction of the person (of aggressiveness and resistance) is accompanied by a belief system (ideology), as well as a set of structured teachings about what that other, who is considered an enemy, is. For this reason, the embargo / blockade cannot exist if it is not also, at the same time, an ideological, communicational and cultural scaffolding.
12. What we have written so far aims to overcome the political and economic evidence to analyze the embargo / blockade as a complex of actions that also includes and branches out through the communicational and cultural spheres; In this way, communication and cultural production are both territory and actors in a battery of actions that constitutes a true cultural war.
All this sum of labyrinthine actions encompasses the same express, direct violence with criminal intent (planting a bomb or shooting at an embassy, as we recently saw), as well as the exclusion of the Island from the circuit of relations that an organization, person or institution proposes to carry out their usual work for fear of direct reprisal, criticism or simple rumors with a political background; To this can be added the same any form of interested silence regarding successes as well as the exploitation of any type of falsehood and / or manipulation about the ways of living the socialist experience on the Island and (along with it) the spectacularization of voids. , failures and errors (of whatever type) that may be in the work of the authority in the country.
13. The internal logic of the embargo / blockade is aimed at refracting and multiplying economic asphyxia in scenarios of fragmentation and social disorder, as well as in manifestations of loss of self-esteem, renunciation of national sovereignty (or willingness to negotiate it) and / or weakening of collective identity.
Any denial of the embargo / blockade and / or its effects on our lives (in all the enormous extent that we have described) is a perverse action. Any masking of failures and / or failures, as well as any rejection of responsibility, behind a providential use of embargo / blockade (typical of pseudo-communist bureaucrats), is a harmful and perverse act as well.
All calls for exchanges, debates, dialogues and other analytical-critical interventions on the future of Cuban society after 1959, as if the embargo / blockade had not existed, as if it were not (right now) that monstrous mechanism of economic erosion, Social and cultural (which even promises to continue towards the future) is already part of the kind of attitude that the embargo / blockade encourages and needs for its effects to be even more profound.
In view of this, all examples of the multiplication of knowledge about the world in which we live, as well as the internal dynamics of the Cuban process, are ways of avoiding and / or facing the logic of the embargo / blockade; every moment of good work, transparency, search and public transmission of truths, every action that promotes national unity, self-esteem, sovereignty, independence and national identity.
Coda: Negotiating is not the problem. Of course, it will be necessary to negotiate (the most dissimilar issues) with the government teams in question in the United States.
The problem is the connection between the asymmetry between the dialogue participants and the translation that such a difference will merit in terms of law; In other words, if it is going to deal with an exchange between sovereign equals or the staging of the bond between a dominator and an obedient debased.
Those who ignore this perspective do not realize that the question of the embargo / blockade (the persistence of its duration over decades, its accumulated effects and its promise of continuity) projected / projects the Cuban question as a universal model of radical confrontation between the “natural” order of big capital (as a kind of recipe for small nations in their relationship with the truly “big” ones) and any alternative that decides to move towards anti-imperialism, third worldism, anti-colonialism and authentic sovereignty.
Cuba matters less than what happens with Cuba and with minds about a debate that – far beyond our small territory – encompasses oppositions such as those that are verified (for any subject and / or territory) between its own nation and a foreign nation , memory and forgetfulness, individualism and collective subject, hegemony and independence, sovereignty and regression, unity and disintegration, logics of hatred and resistance.
That’s what the blockade is about.
