". . . and having done all . . . stand firm." Eph. 6:13

Commentary

How the Lies of Sophistry and Gnosticism led to Totalitarian Cuba

March 28, 2023

Socialism, due to its revolutionary zeal, is incapable of advancing the Truth. Misguided revolutions seek to reform the essence of man, and in order to do this, they attempt to reformulate the senses and the natural law.

The process of social engineering demands that the individual should not seek his own good before the common one (collectivization), should offer his property to the Great Administrator (nationalization), and should disown his family if they do not follow the revolutionary ideal or the charismatic leader of the moment (fanaticism).

The socialist fight against tradition, conventions, reason, and reality — even when it claims to be the revolutionary champion of consensus, science, or a superior morality — is essentially a continuous spiral: the endless process of the “Revolution.”

In this constant flux of changes, the murderous socialist revolutionaries in the 1960s were called progressives, and the new batch of socialists are called conservatives. The new socialists consider the old socialists conservative even when today they impose redefinitions of pre-state entities such as the family or marriage in Cuba, in line with global elites. You are never revolutionary enough for revolutionaries. For them, the Truth has never been sufficiently shot or silenced.

On February 21, Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, a doctor in International Studies, presented his new book “Cuba: The Doctrine of Lies” at the Museum of the Brigade 2506 in Miami. The volume views Truth as much more than a philosophical concept — to attempt to deny it is to also deny reality, natural law, and free human relations. To do this, he uses an extensive investigation into the manuscripts and actions of the Castro leadership.

The Truth, to which Gutiérrez-Boronat dedicates his book, has been the first target of Cuban tyranny. Nothing different can be expected from the regime. He tracked millions of pesos to the international positioning of propaganda entities such as Prensa Latina or the testimony contest of Casa de las Américas.

In the Castro case, reality, one of the manifestations of Truth, has been hidden for decades under wheelbarrows of falsehood. A former UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción) inmate told me in Havana how he, an accountant of the productive results of those concentration camps, was forced to change the statistics that would be sent to the high command, to hide from themselves with a line of zeros the inefficiency of Marxist centralization. And the people, toothless and hungry, smiled for decades in the face of the victorious reports of the Castro National Television Newscast.

According to Gutiérrez-Boronat, the totalitarian temptation is in human nature, but he explains in his book that two types of personalities are especially prone to it: the sophist and the gnostic.

The gnostic believes in the temporal power to reformulate and recreate human nature.

He inevitably comes up against the fact that he can’t do it. He faces reality, the one that Margaret Thatcher considered the worst enemy of socialism. And faced with this, the gnostic has a decision: he perpetuates the lie or attacks reality with greater violence.

The author considers that Ernesto Guevara, in his eagerness to create “the new man,” fell into this field.

The sophist, on the other hand, is convinced from the start that he deals with control mechanisms, and wants absolute power. If accessing that absolute power means breaking human nature, he’s going to do it. “And he is going to use the Gnostic to break it,” said Gutiérrez-Boronat, who was born in Havana in 1965. “Fidel Castro was that kind of individual, and he used Guevara as a hammer, to go on destroying the Cuban economy, agriculture.”

Precisely the harmful restructuring of the Cuban countryside through the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) marked, for the author, the beginning of the Cuban totalitarian model. Some of the steps were to expropriate the private sector of the agricultural industry, centralize it in the hands of the State and, in the end, forcibly collectivize the small agricultural activity through the Cooperatives that today populate the sad Cuban fields as zombie companies.

Apart from this significant blow to large and medium-sized companies, and to the upper and middle classes of an essentially agricultural society, part of the totalitarian lie is to dismiss or make invisible the successes of the Republic. And Gutiérrez-Boronat dedicates the fourth chapter of his research to this.

Before the Revolution, it was national pride that the Cuban peso was quoted one by one against the U.S. dollar. In 2021, Cuba was the most miserable country on the planet according to the annual HAMI index, by socioeconomic analyst Steve Hanke.

In the 1950s, Cuba was the third Latin American country with the highest number of daily calories ingested. Today, the Cuban diet under socialism is worse than that of a slave during the colonial period. If freedom during the Republic delivered architectural works such as the Capitol, the Presidential Palace or the kilometers and kilometers of urban expansion to the west of Havana, in 63 years Castroism has barely left the battered labyrinths of Alamar or Barbosa. The productive, moral, and aesthetic superiority of socialism does not even count as a myth, it is just propaganda.

That is why Kiele Cabrera recently pointed out that totalitarian leaders cannot gain power through democratic means, which is why they become experts in violence. Basically, the Cuban socialists don’t allow elections because they know that no one would vote for them.

In this sense, the work of independent journalism is essential so that, contrary to the sweep of the history of the Republic in the minds of young Cubans, future generations have a documented compendium of what it means to live in Cuba today. Even though the regime has already misrepresented and twisted the Cuban past so much, at least the totalitarian system cannot make them forget the present.

Yoe Suárez is a writer, producer, and journalist, exiled from Cuba due to his investigative reporting about themes like torture, political prisoners, government black lists, cybersurveillance, and freedom of expression and conscience. He is the author of the books “Leviathan: Political Police and Socialist Terror” and “El Soplo del Demonio: Violence and Gangsterism in Havana”.