This seven-part series explores how totalitarianism was implemented in Cuba, dismantling democratic institutions under the promise of social justice. Through its early stages, we examine the mechanisms of control and repression that solidified power. The goal: to warn the United States about far-left ideologies.
Read part one.
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Lawrence Reed, leader of the Foundation for Economic Education, praises the Bible for commanding Christians to love, worship, pray, serve, forgive, be sincere and kind, and learn and grow in spirit and character — things that don’t require police, bureaucrats, political parties, or political programs.
Perhaps the most popular example of this voluntariness is in the parable of the Samaritan who personally helped the robbed man on the road with his own time and resources. In the gospels, Jesus stated: “The poor will always be with you, and you can help them whenever you want.” For Reed, the key here is “you can and should want to help.” Christianity is not about passing the buck to the State when it comes to caring for the needy. Christian charity, however voluntary and sincere, is distinct from the obligatory and impersonal mandates of authorities. In another biblical account, Jesus is approached with a request for redistribution: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Jesus then responded, “Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you?” Finally, he rebuked the envy of the petitioner.
Socialists, to justify themselves, love to cite biblical passages where they believe they warn of calls to class struggle. They use as examples the expulsion of the merchants from the Temple and Jesus’s comment that a camel will pass through the eye of a needle before a rich man enters heaven.
Both cases were admonitions against misguided priorities. In the first, about the misuse of God’s house; in the second, about the great temptations that accompany great riches and can cause an individual to lose salvation.
However, Jesus was very clear in applauding diligence, industriousness, financial intelligence, and the use of skills for wealth creation in his parable of the talents. In the parable of the vineyard workers, there is an exaltation of the right to voluntary contract, private property, and the law of supply and demand. All elements are far removed from socialism.
Therefore, the world created by Jesus’s followers fostered and valued community and free will as fundamental elements. From this, an ethic distinct from that of socialism emanates.
For centuries, politics has attempted, through ideologies, to reproduce the dedicatory effect of faith. Political ideology is a false theology that fanaticizes men without God.
Religion instills a set of values and, consequently, draws a moral line for the group. The exercise of that line produces archetypes. For Christianity, it is Jesus.
The church, on the other hand, insofar as it brings together and coordinates the efforts of the faithful and transmits doctrine through teaching, becomes an institution that gives meaning.
The community, understood as a group that shares a spatial-cultural territory and is animated by a similar worldview, is the underlying human driving force.
Cuban authors such as Ambrosio Fornet and Johan Moya Ramis affirm that the moral foundations of socialism on the island are a direct and adapted inheritance from Christian humanism. However, the most accurate definition of this is that socialism was born in the West, a region culturally and philosophically animated by Christianity. Thus, its thinkers, even with the express task of denying or destroying it, cannot escape basic axioms for understanding the society around them, born of Christianity.
The worldview that nourishes this hemisphere, according to political scientist Ben Shapiro, was born from the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation. Socialism proposes only the imbalance of that dialogue, through the coercive force of the State, in favor of the former. From the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Christian ethics and morality were the global frame of reference for secularist and philosophical currents within Cuban republican society, essentially classical liberalism and conservatism.
The Cuban Communist Party, founded in 1925, denigrated this frame of reference, and this denial became evident when it came to power, abolishing political freedoms, centralizing the economic system, and challenging Christianity as a significant cultural force.
In this hostility, with two such dissimilar ethics, were moral commonalities possible?
Moya Ramis believes he sees some commonalities between the churches and the State — institutions he recognizes as antagonistic — in the first decades of the Revolution. Among them were the defense of family values, marriage headed by the patriarch, and respect for certain moral norms.
The consensus on family and marriage as fundamental institutions of society and the role of male leadership in the defense and building of civilizations has been transversal to political systems of all stripes in every corner of the planet. It is a clear truth from a biological, psychological, and historical perspective, which was not legally contradicted until 2001, when the Netherlands referred to same-sex unions as marriage in law.
Presenting it as a demonstration of the equivalence between a community of faith and totalitarianism is to say that, if Hitler loved his dogs, there is a National Socialist behind every dog owner.
Again, nothing comes from nothing. In any system of thought that emerges in this hemisphere, there will be a dialogue with the Judeo-Christian moral foundation, either to affirm it or, in the case of totalitarianism, to gradually distance itself from it. (It is worth noting, however, that 20th century socialist intellectuals argued that the patriarchal, bourgeois-style family should be left behind, while at the same time recognizing the family as a unique human social institution, with no alternatives.)
Nor is there any real equivalence, for example, between socialism condemning homosexual behavior with forced labor in the 20th century, and Christians considering its practice sinful while preaching redemption to the individual through Christ. In the UMAP (National Prisons of the Apostles) the signs greeted inmates with the phrase “work will make you men,” revealing Marxist materialism, considering homosexuality as a physical, carnal problem; however, in light of the Bible, the churches viewed homosexuality as a manifestation of spiritual fallibility.
In both arguments, the dichotomy between denying the soul and seeing man as a piece of meat, and the integral recognition of the person: body, mind, and eternal spirit, is evident. Some authors intuit the confrontational relationship between socialist and Christian ethics and the prestige in society that churches enjoy as restorers of ethics and morals “left aside by the crisis of values resulting from Marxist ideology.”
In the 21st century, the Guevarian New Man of socialist ethics was on the verge of extinction. On the other hand, “the new Cuban homo religiosus, who four decades ago seemed on the verge of extinction after the victory of materialist and scientific atheism, was reborn stronger than ever.”
And with him, values and doctrines connect Cuban evangelicals among themselves and, naturally, with a family of faith that transcends borders. This global brotherhood challenges the processes imagined by Marx and, today, by his most misguided and ardent followers.
Read part three
