Distributed by The Cuba Free Press Project.

Havana, November 5, 1997, Cuba Free Press

STATEMENT AGAINST POLITICS. By German Castro, Cuba Free Press.

Politics is manipulation. This appears to be the best axiom with which to describe and science and art of governing, and the very reason why so many people have nothing to do with it. It is as if politics would turn everything into something "self-serving", hence returning to times even before the Greeks. Something to describe politics. Even when primitive, it is eminently practical and conceives of society as a raw material, or something to manipulate. And it is thus, as much as it is manipulated, the highest the level of influence of the State over the lives of individuals, or what is the same, as politicized; in direct proportion to the attainment of freedom.

Therefore, in a country like Cuba, where manipulation can reach unthinkable proportions, to the extent that even the idiosynchracies of the people and the very essence of the country can be falsified, in the interest of some "unity", closely linked to the control of power, which can only produce an alienated society.

Hence, when the politicians speak of "nationality" or say "they speak on behalf of the people", what the people want, are doing nothing more than projecting an image of nationality and will of the people which they need to project in order to maintain control.

For example, for the revolution, Cuba is nothing more than a people united around a Socialist ideal. Therefore it is credulous, confident, austere.... in a way that the impressive joining of the blood and culture which truly form it, are synthetically represented by a solid and simple mass which marches in unison, even as the country crumbles under their feet. It is that the mirror facing these mases is not a mirror, but a "picture", a picture of what it is "convenient" to be.

To this extent it is perhaps appropriate to remember how, until 1991, the USSR was a paradigm for Cubans, being as we were bombarded under a relentless pro-Soviet propaganda through books, movies, pictures, cartoons, and all type of media; in such a manner that Cuba was not only subsidized in the economic realm, but also-- and perhaps most of all-- in the ideological realm. And the Cuban government would take for granted this grafting, in spite of the fact that these messages were very much refused by the idiosynchracy, the culture, and the very Cuban nationality, as foreign.

Perestroika had to take place and later the disappearance of the Soviet Union, for the government of Cuba to start to "rectify" its position, even as they used Gorbachev as the punching bag, the representative of an irresponsible experiment. But in the end, when the USSR crumbled, it simply stopped being convenient and the vaccum has not been filled by anyone abroad. Hence, there rose the need to search within the Island, to search for its history, to manipulate and choose libertarian ideals from centuries past, to try to put the broken doll together and continue with the manipulation. Only this time, the only thing being manipulated is the very soul.

Politics is, then, more than the art and science of governing, the art and science of manipulating in order to govern. Politics is manipulation. Knowing this it might be possible to compensate for the damage already done.