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, part two, and part three.
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Since the 1960s, the cultural battle in Cuba has essentially been between a socialist intellectual and bureaucratic elite and ordinary Cubans, whom they denounced as “families with a low cultural level and rigid, authoritarian educational models,” and whom they contrasted with “those with a high cultural level” and “more flexible” models.
Was “cultural level” measured by passing through the Castroist mental assembly line, where men entered and automatons exited? What is a “rigid model”? Instructing minors in respect and observance of the faith? The Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) admitted that motherhood and fatherhood for the “creative couple” might not be “compatible with the approved tasks of professional and cultural training.”
Leftist intellectuals believed religious profession within the family was so “problematic” that they listed it among possible variables for juvenile delinquency. A phenomenon, they said, “foreign to the socialist system” but sustained in Cuba by “remnants of the past that manifest themselves in a minority of families.” What criminals did Christian families produce en masse? Patriots who conspired against totalitarianism, prisoners who shouted “Long Live Christ the King” at the walls, people who refused to cooperate with the regime?
In its 1976 Policy for Education, Science, and Culture, the PCC expected the centralized education system to play an “increasingly prominent” role as a “multilateral educator of children and adolescents, with the active participation of political and mass organizations and the decisive collaboration of the family.” The goal? To turn the child into a cheerleader. By 1987, high school students from a town near Havana included among their parents’ most admired qualities “their socialist political-ideological values.”
The role of the mother and father in the collective was also diluted.
If both had revolutionary commitments, their children could be cared for by other members of the working class or official institutions: “It is necessary that the competent organizations create the conditions for workers to share the care of sick children, both at home and in hospitals, in the event that both [father and mother] have responsibilities in social production.”
Note the robotic language. For the revolutionaries, the system mattered more than the child’s fever. The warm hand of the sick person had to be released before the metal fist of the State.
To subjugate the minds of millions, the PCC made the ideological achieve theological status. Thus, “ideological diversionism,” as we have already analyzed, was a kind of cardinal sin that, in the post-1959 cultural environment, was socially and administratively punished with dismissals, imprisonment, and exile.
To advance social engineering, the State had the entire official apparatus at its disposal.
The younger generation develops in every social environment: the home, the kindergarten, the school, sports, the recreation center, and is influenced by the mass media, literature, and art, each of which directly and to a certain degree impacts their formation and education. The various State agencies, political and mass organizations, the mass media, the family, and society as a whole must act in unison and under the same policy in this complex and comprehensive formative process. It is the task of the national education system to guarantee the younger generations a scientific conception of nature, society, and thought, based on Marxist-Leninist theory.
They envisioned that all this would contribute, through education, to the assimilation of principles and norms of socialist morality, which would become accepted convictions and rules of conduct. The sooner the better.
The kindergarten (three and four-year-olds), through a proper organization of education, in accordance with the age and capabilities of the children, will tend to create conditions for physical and intellectual development to form certain customs and moral qualities in accordance with the objectives of communist education.
The School and Daycare Council, in charge of this oversight, was to “cooperate with the educational center in the fulfillment of its educational tasks and demand that the school’s activities be aimed at the socialist and communist formation of the new generations.”
The atomized individual, no longer with faith, tradition, or marital-family loyalty, could be effortlessly molded into the service of the State. Cultural deconstruction, however, could take longer than expected. Why? The family with traditional values.
The PCC lamented, for example, “the limitations of parents and teachers in answering or addressing many issues of elementary pedagogical and psychological content, essential for the proper education of children and young people, especially those related to sexual matters.” Its aspiration was to instrumentalize the family, to turn it into a transmission belt of obedience to the State.
Mass organizations were to “instill in parents the great responsibility for the communist education of their children.” The family would act “in unison” and be governed “by a single policy” alongside state entities and the media.
Cubans would live in perpetual and calculated mental programming, both outside and inside the home.
An example of this was the assimilation of the new anti-conservative ethic regarding sexuality.
At home, “the encouragement that young people and children receive, as well as the examples they observe, would be of capital importance. Within moral education, special importance is given to the need for adequate sexual education, beginning at home and scientifically reinforced at school, including content on sexual education in the curriculum.”
Taught by the state educational system, the only legal one, it would initiate minors into sexual conversations without parental supervision and, in the case of Christians, contrary to their values.
In 1973, Marxist researchers were not surprised by the widespread dissolution of marriages and families within the promoted socialist system. “The break with many traditions implied by the revolutionary process created a series of conditions that led to a redefinition of the role of men and women in marriage and also of the role of the father and mother within the family structure. The increase in the incidence of divorce is an expression of this situation.”
Between 1954 and 1974, legal and consensual unions increased, but the percentage of divorces tripled. Among the causative factors were the “rise in the educational and ideological level of the population and of women in particular,” the “resistance to change in traditional values, contradictions between the individual’s attitude and socially outdated situations,” and the impossibility of a young married couple achieving “adequate material living conditions.”
At the same time, the declining birth rate became a notable feature of the socialist family.
The evolution of fertility between 1959 and 1985 can be divided into two stages: the 1960s, a decade of increase, and the subsequent decade, a decade of decline in the gross reproductive rate (the average number of daughters a woman would have in her lifetime). Added to this was early fertility and a reduction in the number of children. And, once again, among the factors driving these trends were the “transformation” of “conceptions about children, the new position of women in society with their greater participation not only as workers but also in other tasks of the revolution.”
A local study also linked the phenomenon to “young people’s attitudes and behaviors toward fertility, sexuality, marriage, and consensuality, which has resulted in a marked rejuvenation of the fertility structure” — more pregnancies at early ages. Most university students did not view prenuptial relations as immoral.
Read part five
