IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 69

Given all the visible effects, a progressive
way out is guaranteed, not only and not so
much due to any group’s political agenda,
or projects whose identity and orientation
go from center to left, but because of society itself.

free health care and the government keeps
selling the idea that healthcare is free.
Given its tripartite structure, the model of
underdevelopment adopted by the government offers no escape from the current situation; neither does it allow for the preservation of social benefits in Cuba. It consists of
strategic dependence of foreign primary
materials, the inner workings of a narrative
that accomodates a disaster in a context of
historic nationalism, and blocking the economic initiative of people within Cuba’s
collectivist autarchy.

The global left’s confusion regarding Cuba
stems from the power with which, those
who made the revolution thinking that ‘revolution’ persists in power. This confusion,
aside from being logically impossible, also
loses sight of the hidden social revolution
that has been taking shape in Cuba over at
least the past 20 years, in the mutually supportive economies of neighborhoods and
communities, hidden yet shared communication and information networks, social
tolerance for diversity, and an unproblematic opening to other realities that were denied to us for more than 50 years. In all
these ways, progressive Cuban society, per
se, in all its principal variations, is ahead of
and reproduces itself despite the State. This
explains why those who visit us from
abroad are more amazed by who and how
we are, than Cubans are when we travel
abroad.

And now, the problem worsens, from within the power sphere. The militarization of
the economy, which is shared by proprietary, patrimonial and political families;
precarious self-employment (cuentapropismo), and a restructuring of dependence (on
foreign remittances) are occurring concomitantly with changes unthinkable for the left,
a McDonalds-like commercialization of
health care whose cost is determined by the
market. The Latin Americanization of Cuba
is here, and it’s obvious.
Yet, there is a progressive way out from
this disaster, and Barack Obama facilitated
it after December 17th, 2014. The enemy
narrative that was a subconscious, political
projection regarding the United States, and
served as a formidable political instrument,
collapsed. Better yet, so did the structure of
the narrative that explained our disaster in
historic nationalism and continuously immobilized society’s democratic plans. This
was the way the Cuban government
achieved something unimaginable: a normalization of the exceptional nature of a
conflict, and rarify Cuban society’s plural,
logically democratic nature. This was no
small feat, one that even today persists in its
negation of Cuba’s occidental condition.
Yet, another Cuba is being written since
December 17th.

The conservative machinery born of the
revolution’s rhetoric made the decision to
permanently block all the progressive solutions Cuban society has been attempting to
develop and discuss all along, in response
to the needs created by the model of underdevelopment adopted by the State. No matter how much of a fact global consensus
regarding the market economy is, the Cuban reality is that the government has introduced the worst kind of market formulas.
Cubans on the island, from all walks of life,
have ideated formulas for wellbeing that
embrace the market economy, but not a
market society. The commercialization of
health care, for example, is and could only
be a State project in Cuba. Society has never imagined anything like this. Cubans want

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