There has been an eerie echo of the 21st century reverberating through the news this last week. Ten Russian spies were deported from Russia in exchange for four alleged “double agents”. The theatricality of the swap, which took place on the tarmac of Vienna airport was not lost on the master of the spy novel, John Le Carre who was as bemused as the rest of us at the significance of this cold war re-enactment. In the same week, the Cuban government promised to release 52 political prisoners as part of a deal agreed between Cuban authorities and the Roman Catholic church brokered by the Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos.There’s little doubt that the deal was struck to improve Cuba’s human rights image on the world’s stage – and encourage trade with Europe. After the death in February of Zapata Tamayo who had been on hunger strike in a Cuban prison, the protests of the Damas de Blanco, and the hunger strike of Guillermo Farina, all of which received extensive coverage in the world’s press, it seems the Cuban government couldn’t ‘tough it out’ any longer. So, as I write, the first seven prisoners released have, with their family and close relatives, landed in Madrid to begin a new life in exile. Was the deal conditional on the prisoners agreeing to expatriation? If so, how many will refuse that condition? What is certain is that dissidence – that word we associate most commonly with the twentieth century and Soviet communism – is alive, well and kicking in Cuba.
As these echoes reverberate I’m reading Hope and Memory by Tzvetan Todorov. For Todorov the most significant innovation and greatest evil of the twentiethy century was totalitarianism. Unlike many historians, Todorov considers fascism and Communism as two of its variants. The book examines in detail the origins and development of totalitarianism to support this hypothesis as well as including a moving account of six people who resisted it. Todorov is himself a survivor of a totalitarian regime (he spent the first 24 years of his life in communist Bulgaria) adding weight not only to his evocation of those six people, but also to his implicit criticism of the (largely left-leaning) intellectual conceit that the Soviet regime was progressive and that it’s ‘errors’ could either be conveniently forgotten or understood to be stages on the way to social justice. Todorov attacks the conceit by contrasting the ideal of totalitarianism with the ideal of democracy and detailing the similarities between variants of the ideal of totalitarianism, Stalinist communism and Nazism. It’s an attack that needs to be extended to the conceit – still held by many – that Cuba is an island stubbornly holding out against the imperial ambitions of its Goliath neighbour; that it is still trying to achieve a social justice so totally abandoned by the Capitalist world; that its achievements in education and health justify its intolerance; and that the future would be rosy if only its sovereignty could be respected.
It’s clearly difficult for me to read Hope and Memory without reflecting on Cuba. Todorov’s analysis gives constant food for comparison. Here’s how he characterises totalitarianism:
Because the group must take precendence over the individual, pluralism in a totalitarian state is relaced by its opposite, monism. This means that:
On the one hand, individual life is no longer divided between a free private sphere and a regulated public sphere; instead, everything in it, including beliefs, tastes, and affections, becomes part of a unified whole which must conform to public standard. … On the other hand, a totalitarian system imposes monism in all aspects of public life so as to reach the ideal of an organically unified and “bonded” community. By making the state dogma out of a single ideal, by requiring subjects to subscribe to it, by establishing itself as a “virtuous state”, totalitarianism effectively restores the old unity of the theological and the political. (14)
That ‘public standard’ in the merged private/public sphere in Cuba is constantly monitored and those who are seen to subvert the standard run the continuum of pressure to conform, of being hounded, villified, stigmatised, criminalised and, ultimately, expatriated. The expression of difference is anti-social, anti-social is anti-state and so, very easily, pluralism becomes an act of treason. Even when Cubans retreat into the four walls of a small apartment, the unfreedom of that private space allows for little development of autonomous thinking – so little free dialogue dilutes its future possibility. Public dogma can very quickly colonise private space.
Totalitarianism subordinates economics to the political sphere through nationalisation and ever-changing edicts of state control. The changing ideological climates in Cuba have meant that any ‘opening’ of the economic sphere towards less central, state control has always been provisional. Trading licences are given then removed without explanation. Markets appear and then disappear according to political whim.
A totalitarian state operates a single party system which means the abolishing of political parties altogether. The state takes control of all other types of public organisations and associations. The difficulty of assembly in Cuba makes the legal formation of non-government approved groups impossible. The only alternative is to act clandestinely – however open or secretive you are prepared to be. The Catholic church may have emerged into a more open position during the last few years but its an involuntary alliance – a pragmatic, strategic valve to which the state holds the key. Hence the use of the Roman Catholic Church in the release of the political prisoners.
Social unification gives form to a new social hierarchy: the masses obey party members, party members obey the nomenklature (the party elite), and these in turn are the servants of the inner circle of leaders at whose apex sits the supreme commander, or “guide”. Whilst the system may be creaking in Cuba and lip-service often paid to obedience, this is still the system that operates and without recourse to another system, even lip-service is enough to maintain it. Raul may be the President of the Council of State, but Fidel remains an influential “guide”. I’m sure there was no coincidence that Fidel appeared on Cuban TV, after a long absence, the same evening that the released prisoners left Cuba from Jose Marti airport. Nor was it a coincidence that no mention was made of the prisoners during the one and a half hour broadcast.
In totalitarian regimes on paper, the sovereignty of the people is respected, but in practice the “general will” is hijacked to benefit the leadership group, which uses elections as plebiscites. Whilst the product of the elections in Cuba may be transparant, the processes which lead up to them are certainly not. The sovereignty of the people expressed through the “general will” is a construct, moulded and manipulated for the benefit of those in power. Used then as a mirror it reflects itself in never-ending self-perpetuation. It does so because all information services are controlled by the regime; no dissident opinion can be expressed. The trials and tribulations of attmpts at alternative publishing in Cuba are legendary.
The ideal of equality is proclaimed, but in fact totalitarian society is riddled with complex hierarchies and levels of priviledge. The priviledges of the party elite (in educational choices, career advancement, travel opportunities) have been inbuilt since the beginning of the 1960s in Cuba. Only now with the less oblique, more transparant overlay of the dual economy, has the situation become critical and the legitimacy of the ideal begun to be questioned. But it is the dollar economy that is criticised – of course it is. To criticise the priviledges endemic to the system would not be tolerated.
Todorov does not discuss ‘authoritarian’ states in Hope and Memory. It’s an interesting ommission though I tend to think with regard to Cuba that the label has been used as a sop to those still holding to the conceit and as a distancing mechanism from the more extreme right-wing views of some Cubans in Miami. Todorov’s book stimulates thought – as I’ve shown above – and is full of wisdom on every page. He reminds us that the habits of thinking that engendered totalitarianism have not gone away – they are alive in Cuba but they are also alive in the utopian ideals of freedom and the war against evil that have fuelled the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the accounts of Vasily Grossman, Margarete Buber-Neumann (a survivor of both Soviet and Nazi concentration camps), David Rousset, Primo Levi, Romain Gary and Germaine Tillion, Todorov shows the human capacity for seeing good even in the face of the most extreme suffering. We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, Todorov says, but struggling against ‘the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found’. Ultimately, for Todorov as for Grossman, it is freedom and kindness that mark the path for humanity – a path towards the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy of the collective.
The reflection of the the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves. ( Grossman: Life and Fate 69)