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Revolution in Cuba: Propaganda or Truth?

30/08/08

Journeying down Cuba’s Carretera Central (Central Highway) that links Pinar del Rio in the east to Santiago and the city of Guatanamo in the west, one is struck immediately by the imaginative and varied presence of colourful billboards and what, at first sight, appear to be advertisements.

These ‘adverts’, however, are not commercials illustrating the happy life you would lead if you consumed a certain product or lived in a certain area (like the almost-comical “live life to the full” exhortations regarding the recently developed Titanic Quarter in Belfast).

Rather, these billboards illustrate something more complex, something unfamiliar to western eyes long immune to the pseudo-happiness sold through the spectacular capitalist image industry.

There comes first a series of four, with the first beginning “Revolucion es... (Revolution is...)”. What follows is a list of attributes that characterise the Cuban revolution and revolutionary morality. So it follows, “Revolucion es:

• es ser tratado y tratar a los demas como seres humanos (to be treated and treat others like human beings);
• es no mentir jamas ni violar principos eticos (to never lie or violate ethical principles);
• es igualdad y libertad plenas (full equality and freedom);
• es conviccion profunda de que no existe fuerza en el mundo capaz de aplastar la fuerza de la verdad y las ideas (the profound conviction that there doesn’t exist in this world a force capable of crushing the strength of truth and ideas).”

Of course, it is obvious that detractors of the Cuban Revolution will insist that such messages are simply items of propaganda to subdue the population into compliance with the dictates of the Communist Party line. Such a criticism ought not to be dismissed as merely right-wing propaganda (although that may indeed be the case). Instead, it is better to consider what this criticism entails.

The use of the billboard in Cuba – according to this argument – is nothing but a tool with which to oppress the minds of the Cuban people.

However, looked at honestly, can it really be said that living in a society in which, for example, internationalism is considered a virtue, is really such a bad thing? All the more so, because in Cuba, the practice of solidarity (both on an international and at a community level) is so entrenched. Is it really propaganda to say imperialism is wrong and it ought to be challenged and defeated? Was it wrong for tens of thousands of Cuban volunteers to dedicate their lives towards the liberation of Angola from the combined forces of European imperialism and Apartheid South Africa?

Compare the words of the great 19th Century patriot Jose Marti, “Patria es Humanidad (Homeland and Humanity)”, with the corporate slogan, “enjoy Coke” – a phrase as prominently on display in capitalist states as Marti's words are in Cuba.

Which is propagandising? The words that proclaim the unity of humankind through their struggles for liberty and independence or the empty injunction to “enjoy” a non-existent lifestyle produced by a company known to be complicit in the murder of hundreds of trade unionists.

The answer is obvious. Not because the Cuban Revolution is infallible, but because the ideals and ethics which underpin it are. Such ethics are not, however, empty moral axioms that exist in theory rather than in practice, but they are instead the practical application of socialist values.

And it is in this way that the superior nature of the socialist society is demonstrated.

As a brief glance at developed capitalist societies, including Ireland, shows, the promotion of selfish individualism prevents the harnessing of all the resources at our disposal for the building of a better society. The consumerist ideology clouds the possibility of viewing oneself as a part of a greater, intrinsically valuable whole; like a community, a nation or the human race. It leaves individuals isolated from those around them.

The images of advertising reflect this through the way they communicate to the population, as it is always the individual who is addressed. These adverts address millions of individuals in the same way, with lures of wealth and a luxurious lifestyle, made impossible by the fact that, if every human being sought such a lifestyle at any cost, humanity itself would cease to exist.

The true values of the Cuban Revolution that reflect the individual in their fullest sense – as an intrinsic member of a community, a nation and the world – are reflected in billboards on every road and in every city or town.

They are erected as a reminder of our humanity and the struggle that it takes to realise the full potential of that humanity in a world brutalised by capitalism. They are a reminder and an exhortation to realise the necessity of creating and sustaining a new ethical system that embeds the revolutionary changes of the past 50 years in the small Latin American country.

To assert humanity through life and struggle is not propaganda; it is truth.

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