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itself up at sufficiently complex levels so that
each person can forget or lower his or her esteem
regarding a limitless number of events. This is
what those in power demand and expect. How is
it possible for anyone who accepted that Fidel
Alejandro Castro Ruz would become the only
protagonist of the insurrection, against all predictions, and that it would be in bad taste to remember the battles in which the great leader did not
take part, evaluate his or her participation in the
Cuban Revolution of the 1950s? How can a veteran of the war in Angola who has accepted remaining silent about Arnaldo Ochoa, the general
who victoriously commanded him over recent
decades, for whom he was willing to die, and who
was later judged as a traitor and executed only a
few weeks later, evaluate himself?
When these silences required by those in power
are accepted, or internalized by an individual, his
or her pride and esteem are corrupted through personal efforts. Memory becomes an accuser who is
better not to convene. The rejection of memory is
socially supported by the degradation of expressed individuality. Ideological diversionism, a
widely used but familiar term for Cubans of many
generations, pejoratively marks anyone who distinguishes him or herself from the militant uniformity promoted by the State. When the one and
only rhetoric seeks to undermine young people
who don’t fully integrate, it doesn’t hesitate in labeling them attributes of whatever it wants people
to see. In his March 13, 1963 speech, Fidel Castro
spoke of young people uncomfortable with the
system in the following manner:
There is a specimen, another byproduct that we
should fight. It’s that young man who is 16, 17,
15 years old, and doesn’t study, or work; so, they
are really just low-class guys, on corners in bars
who go to some theaters, take a few liberties and
get away with some stuff… [Of] course, they
don’t clash with the Revolution as a system, but
they clash against the law, and by chance become
counterrevolutionaries… [Many] of these lazy
youth, children of bourgeois parents, just go
around with pants that are a little too tight; some
of them have a guitar and act in an ‘Elvis Presley-

like’ manner, and they’ve taken their debauchery
to the extreme of which to go to some public
places and freely organize their effeminate
shows.”
In “El diversionismo ideológico, del rock, la
moda y los enfermitos” [Ideological diversionism: Of rock, fashion and the sickies], Ernesto
Juan Castellanos explains that this speech defined
a social policy that paired homosexuality with
criminals, lower class and lazy people.
Subjects promoted by those in power should not
express or exhibit themselves. Whoever respects
this is celebrated by the regime. In his concept of
revolution, as he expressed it in 2000 and happily
disseminated through this State-run propaganda
machine, the Commander-in-Chief (Fidel Castro)
extoled modesty and sacrifice and other virtues
that revolutionaries supposedly should have. For
exclusive leadership, modesty is the ability to defer one’s pride and any expression of individuality’s importance. Obituaries of those who come to
deserve them in the official Cuban press go on
and on about the modesty of those who departed
(the President’s middle name was also Modesto);
they exalt those who bore their merits in a silent
and irrelevant way.
Another form of forgetfulness is the inability to
remember. Historical science must permanently
renew its story. New information is obtained;
novel theories are offered. The memories of one
or another participant are edited and put up for
sale to the great public. This should cause us to
rethink the history that has been constructed, yet
it is necessary to remember to make history, and
we also have to want to tell it.
This is tough when there is exclusive power.
Once it has managed basic forgetting, it disdains
the task of reconstruction so much a part of intellectual and academic work. We intellectuals
come into being with a sin: not being sufficiently
revolutionary, as Ernesto Guevara declared in
1965, to exclude himself from a group to which
he belonged, because of what it was like, and its
social and family origin.
If impeding the realization of an academic history
is important for any authoritarian power, it is

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