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.
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How would social engineers accelerate the imposition of a new revolutionary morality?
By aiming to indoctrinate the new generations and promote models other than the traditional family and marriage.
For the first group, a fundamental role was played by the extensive network of rural scholarships, where minors alternated hours of hard, unpaid agricultural labor for state-owned companies, with a Marxist curriculum that valued loyalty to the regime and the rejection of tradition. Children remained away from their parents for most of the year, and the State, in practice, had more influence on the upbringing of the new generations than the family.
This could be seen in the debates among pre-university students, who described the way their parents viewed society and the transmission of ancestral values as “a problem.” To solve this problem, they demanded “sex education” and called those who saved their virginity for marriage “backward.” They said, “We have to impose our ideas,” “We have to be a little drastic,” “We have to be freer in love and impose our new form of marriage.” Such concepts, in truth, aimed at eliminating the institution of marriage: “What is it? Signing a little piece of paper and nothing more. The rest is the same, but you don’t have to sign anything. The moment two people stop liking each other, well, you go there and I go here, without any fuss or trouble.”
The new men and women conceived of their partners as pleasure toys, between whom there should be no commitment or social restrictions other than those dictated by passions. Hormonal gyrations, a mass of bones and muscles guided in their intimate relationships by internal chemistry, and, at the same time, an iron soldier for the Revolution.
The family reproduces social relations; It models for the child a sort of reduced social model, in a unique atmosphere of conjugal love for the benefit of the children.
Marxist social scientists recognized this, but used it as a key reason for refounding the institution; and if they exalted its functions and customs, they did so to exploit it. At the same time, they rejected tradition as an acceptable ideal for the bright future they fantasized about.
In Cuba, the tasks to this end were announced in this language: “Replace the commercial economic motives of marriage with aesthetic-moral motives, replace the patriarchal and authoritarian family with a family based on relations of equality and mutual respect, place personal happiness and the education of children at the forefront of family life, harmonize cooperation between the family and society and base it on the unity of individual and social interests.”
Through economic, social, and cultural changes, the State would theoretically modify the nature of child rearing, marriage, and family. Socialist authors wished to remake both institutions without the variable of private property in the equation, proposing concepts such as “free love,” “full sexual freedom,” etc. — sex without a marital pact.
The demand for sex education to erase the traditional conception of marriage and family from the minds of the new generations was not long in materializing. In the 1970s, it was imposed as a mandatory subject in the centralized school system. The State would discuss sex with minors before their families did, further weakening parental authority and the right of parents to choose the education their children would receive.
Cuban socialism sought to influence the family from primary school, “contributing to the establishment of relationships of mutual cooperation in social duties, in the home, and in the education of children.” An indoctrinated family would facilitate the indoctrination of children.
Totalitarianism was concerned about possible “antisocial manifestations” in the behavior of children and adolescents, and understood that, “first and foremost, the family environment directly transmits them.” This family power could bring about stains on the new society, such as absenteeism or dropping out of the ideologized school system, yes; but also “a lack of concern for the development of collectivist sentiments and love for the Revolution, work, country, and school.”
The Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) demanded parents be active in indoctrination. Homes belonged to the State; whatever was discussed at the dinner table, at the weekend dinner, had to contribute to the goals of socialism. “Adults who act by omission also indirectly reinforce the consolidation of negative behaviors that, when repeated and aggravated over time, can lead some children and adolescents to commit crimes.” Imagine if your child ended up a counterrevolutionary! Or worse: a conservative!
“Compliance with wrongdoing fosters a climate of impunity in which the externalization of antisocial behavior or the ‘remnants of the past’ becomes feasible.” Was he referring to the political system of individual freedoms and the free market, with its inherent Christian morality? How far removed was revolutionary catechesis from Christian morality! At their core, Castroism and Christianity elevate antithetical moralities: the traditional and the socialist, respectively. A legal crystallization of socialist morality in Cuba occurred in the “institutionalizing” year of 1976.
Around that year, a mock unicameral parliament called the National Assembly of People’s Power (ANPP) was born, which aerobically voted “yes” to every Castro proposal, and the first revolutionary Constitution and Family Code (CdF, which established the “new legal norms” that would govern “family relations in our proletarian state”).
The documents that methodologized the structure of the new socialist society targeted minors, potential New Men, minds that would absorb leftist instruction, a precious tabula rasa without the bourgeois “original sin” of which Ernesto “Che” Guevara spoke.
If the Bible calls for loving God above all, and honoring one’s father and mother, totalitarianism calls for loving the Leader in this way, and forsaking one’s parents if they deny it; it establishes the idea of the nanny state, which claims to protect and provide.
From Christianity springs the contradiction between faith in God and the veneration of Castro, which the revolutionaries feared. It is the wrench that jams the cogwheel of totalitarian indoctrination.
There is no totalitarianism that does not attack the family. It knows that in the catacombs of the home, that small homeland has the potential to resist evil and preserve what is beautiful, good, and true.
At the same time, the paternal risk is great if they contradict, verbally or actively, or simply flee the State. It ranged from separations to orders to murder entire families, including babies — as in the massacres of Río Canímar (1980), Remolcador 13 de Marzo (1994), or Bahía Honda (2022).
Castroism has had no qualms about ideologically dividing families and inviting parents and children to spy on each other and betray each other to those in power, as the writer Eliseo Alberto has recounted.
It is common for Cuban schools to stop teaching to mobilize children in “acts of repudiation” against opponents or pro-democracy activists, without parental consent or knowledge.
To influence the development of new generations according to party guidelines, it was key to break the authority of the family, coercing it through the law and indoctrinating it in the institutions that give meaning.
Let’s review some documents that outlined these guidelines.
The 1976 Programmatic Platform of the PCC, regarding labor and social policy, asserted that if family and social education converged “harmoniously,” individuals would participate more “in social work” and, conversely, the contradictions between the two would lead to a relative detachment of family members from social work. This would manifest itself through activism in mass organizations, parades, demonstrations of “love for the Revolution,” etc. Since the 1970s, the State has tied the desired moral education to “the foundations of socialist morality that we must instill in our children,” such as “love for their parents and siblings, for the adults who care for them, for their peers, the development of [socialist] moral qualities, the establishment of standards of discipline, love of work and respect for workers and their work, love of our homeland [Revolution] and other peoples [internationalism].”
Parents’ duties would be focused on ensuring the physical and mental health of their children and educating them within the political boundaries of socialist society and ideology.
The State needed, through the family and social propaganda, to generate more arms for its service, and a cultural-moral change that would guarantee generations of vassals, no longer citizens.
Read part four
