Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba by De Ferrari Guillermina

Author:De Ferrari, Guillermina.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Theorizing Evil

Originally, the Cuban revolution constituted itself as a good in opposition to a specific evil; namely, American imperialism and the concentration of political control in the hands of a foreign-oriented oligarchy. Early on, it proclaimed itself as a Marxist endeavor. In the light of the dialectical materialism it embraced, the revolution saw itself as the final stage in a dynamic process of revolutionary attempts and failures since the wars of independence that would help free Cubans from imperial bonds once and for all.4 However, by rejecting concepts like “criticism from within,” the revolution also failed to view itself critically, therefore preventing the possibility of enabling further qualitative change. Eventually, the permanent war against imperialism became an excuse for the perpetuation of the political class, creating an artificial state of affairs that pays lip service to the values of 1959 but no longer sustains them. One could say that the revolutionary state no longer invokes the truth in whose name it operates. Now an inoperative situation, the institutionalized revolution is a Simulation, in Baudrillard’s words, or perhaps a Simulacrum, one of the forms of evil recognized by Badiou.

In his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Badiou analyzes ethics as a generalized social mechanism put in motion by a game-changing event. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser, Badiou argues that no values exist outside the situation created by an event; therefore, it is the fidelity to the situation that determines the codes according to which we participate and interpret historical and social situations, as well as the general rules that govern our being together. In the Cuban case, fidelity to the revolution as a truth-process is apparently in place. Politically, at least, the ideal of the revolution still functions as a virtual point of reference. Remarkably, the situation that began in 1959 did not come to a recognizable end in 1989, nor did it undergo any significant modification. The post-Soviet socialist social contract not only failed to correct the imbalances of the original Soviet-style revolutionary contract, but actually rendered it unsustainable. This is how an ethically superior political endeavor became a simulacrum of truth. In the Special Period, the combination of a lack of freedoms and of basic goods could be experienced by a single individual as belonging to an order of things comparable to that of natural disasters. Unrestrained austerity put most of the population in a situation of intolerable, subhuman living conditions in the name of a collective faith that was scarce in practice. The fact that this situation could have been avoided by applying consistent political and economic changes that were expressly forbidden by an inoperative socialist social contract makes this dehumanization both artificial and unnecessary. Post-Soviet socialist Cuba is a truth that has been pushed too far. Alan Badiou would call the current state of the revolution “a simulacrum of truth,” for it is a truth-process that “convokes not the void [that it really is] but the full ‘particularity’ or presumed substance of the situation” it no longer is (2001, 73).

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