IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 42

features of the left-wing totalitarianism:
one-party system, political police,
judicial and repressive system that
violated the rights of any citizen at the
whim of the dictator, and absolute
control of the media. In addition, a
single one ideological point of view
about the country and its destiny was
established by terror: the grotesque
"Trujillista thinking." What that means
is something that perhaps only a few
experts can explain with certain
syntactical consistency.
Trying to define a very simple scheme
of general behavior, you can guess most
of these regimes in our hemisphere
didn´t end up as the result of organized
and decisive actions by the opposition
civilian forces, the armed triumph of a
rebel army or a foreign intervention by
peacekeeping forces.
Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, El Salvador,
Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil and others
Latin American countries moved toward
democracy from the very center of the
dictatorial power. As soon as the
determinant internal and external factors
of support ceased, the dictatorships
were dismantled and the military came
back to the barracks. Despite many
heinous crimes, tortures and abuses
against human rights, the suffered
majority in all the nations preferred
making a clean slate and postponing for
a distant future any widespread
campaign of justice against the
criminals. That´s important. However
cruel and unjust it appears to the victims
even today, the people chose to restart
and to cure the country instead of
sinking into the immediate prosecution
of many criminals and collaborators.
The political rival versus the Cuban
future
Despite the uniqueness and vehemence
attributed to the Cuban case, its
wearisome outcome of national
stagnation is not unusual. We have
already recalled that almost never the
people under socialism could shake off

it by themselves. Only the reversal of an
internal, external or both types of
determining factors suddenly changed
the stagnant situation. This revealed
latent changes in society, so far hidden
and unsuspected, but hardly restrained.
The observation brings up some
peculiarities in Cuba. The Castroite
regime succeeded in establishing the
ideological boundaries of a national
reality that the regime itself built until
turning it into an infested pigpen.
Despite being a valuable factor for the
moral resistance by the citizens against
the military tyranny, the peaceful Cuban
opposition fails to forge a national
consensus for rejecting the directions
that the country is taking. The
opposition does not know how to leave
out the limited vision established by the
regime upon the national reality either.
Although it seems a shocking
conclusion, no decisive event of
independent thinking or Realpolitik has
occurred over more than half a century
in Cuba. Neither inside nor outside this
madhouse, nor even among the
opponent groups that could be called
think tanks. The purposes are
mistakenly taken as the realities
available to accomplish them.
It is difficult to explain why, from the
very beginning, the peaceful Cuban
opposition accepted the so-dubbed
expert opinions, unquestioned under
penalty of anathema, about the global
political vision imposed by the military
regime. In an age where globalization
and technological advances drive the
world to radical changes towards
progress and communication, the
distances are reduced and the focus is
altered.
Despite the efforts by the regime to cut
the access to technology, we inevitably
reach part of it. However, there is no
serious united effort by the different
trends of change towards democracy to
create their own vision and preferences
in foreign policy based on human rights,
rule of law and international law for

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