IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 66

Cuba: Memory of Democracy
and Cultural Paradigm*

in Cuba

Manuel Cuesta Morúa
Historian and political scientist
Spokesperson Progressive Arc Party (Parp)
National Coordinator Nuevo País Platform
Member Citizen’s Committee for Racial Integration (CIR)
Havana, Cuba

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hat should we call the pact we Cubans
need for the nation-building project
that is coming soon? From a fundamental perspective, we might call it the great coexistence. If this is not the name chosen by consensus, it is my idea and my proposal, at the very
least.
A name reflects a telos (an end, purpose or goal).
The provisional telos of nations—a conscious
contradiction—emerges from its profound challenges.
France had its own regarding the ideals of liberty,
equality and fraternity. In the eighteenth century,
these were the challenges of a third state, a simple
people that was suffering from the profound inequalities of a nation—a conglomeration of nations. According to Víctor Riquetti, the Marquis
de Mirabeau (1719-1789), it did not have adequate representation in the simulacrum of a parliament with which the sovereigns anesthetized
political life.
Yet, the challenge behind all that inequality lived
in people’s thinking, in organizational rules, and
in the paradigm that regulated social life. Liberty,
equality and fraternity created the psychosocial
projection with which post-revolutionary France
denounced the existing cultural structure, one that
was not convenient for the country’s needs.

If Queen Marie Antoinette was capable of the indecency of telling people to go eat cake if there
was not bread, when they complained of hunger,
her comment was just reflecting the nature of an
ancestrally aristocratic society that confused liberty with royal sovereignty, equality with courtesan participation, and fraternity with religious piety.
This needed to be deconstructed and dismantled,
and that is precisely what the philosophers did
with their magnificent diatribes against the ancien
regime.
For a lack of what to call what they were proposing, they gave it three names, a trilogy of concepts
that by now has been trampled by libertarians all
over our global village. Thus, this process created
a nation of citizens.
Germany also had its telos: create a State that satisfied its historical reality and the force of its
grandeur and cultural homogeneity. Naturally,
they made a mist