La Doble Moral: The Problem of Truth in Cuba

¨We don't tell the people to believe; we tell them to read.¨ Fidel
Castro


Using the phone in the neighborhood office of the CDR, the Committee in Defense of the Revolution, I am surprised to see a photo of my own neice staring up from among photos of local kids, birthday parties and Revolutionary quotations written on scraps of paper. I'm so surprised it takes me a second to recognize her. It makes me mildly uneasy to see her there, only because I know Ana, who is a secretary here, also put the quotations under the fiberglass desktop, and I happen to know firsthand she believes very few of them. Don't believe, read?! Yeah, right. She puts these quotations in because that's what Cubans are supposed to do: demonstrate support of the Revolution. And they do it terribly well.

The CDR, first designed to ferret out couter revolutionaries plotting violence against the state, is the organization that has caused people to claim that the walls have ears for almost 50 years. In actuality, the CDR does a lot of good in many neighborhoods in Cuba; when someone's out of work, they help find work. When someone's refridgerator reaches a state of no repair and she has no resources to replace it, they step in to help. They give summer classes to keep local kids busy, and they provide an avenue for local complaints and demands, a forum for local discussions. But they also convince Cubans to rat each other out; perhaps the intention remains protection of the state and the neighborhood, but the effect hurts every community's solidarity and creates a climate of constant fear. And this makes it more or less impossible to know what Cubans really think. About anything.

Cubans have a name for the problem of truth: they call it ¨la doble moral -- the double moral.¨ What they mean is that what a Cuban claims as his opinion will depend entirely on his audience, not on what he really thinks. He will give one truth to a friend, and another, more officially accepted truth to those not in confidence. On a formal level, this means there are serious limitations to freedom of the press because the press will print few criticisms--and even the most critical printed go after social problems and issues in daily life, not after the system or government itself. The press has to watch its back, obviously, but the press itself is state-run, and as one journalist pointed out to me, the press manipulates the news to the advantage of those in power the world over. She said the Cuban press doesn't lie--it just omits (and she seemed markedly proud of that distinction). But on a more informal and personal level, Cubans write few truly polemic articles to begin with. Fear of repercussions makes Cubans censor themselves, which is even more damaging, both individually and collectively. Clearly, Fidel's claim that they aren't forcing thought but encouraging exploration of ideas is untrue even if Cuba does have the highest literacy rate in the world.

Cubans have grown up without a culture of debate and discourse; especially those born just before or during the Revolution have little sense of the shades of grey to every issue, little capacity for pluralism. Everything is painted in black and white here. There is one ¨Round Table¨ program on TV, but most Cubans change the channel or go to the bathroom during it--and again, it only debates social problems, not the system. Classroom teachers and textbooks tell Cubans what to think and do not encourage critical thinking. The heroes of the Revolution are painted as perfect, flawless individuals, when any human has his flaws. The Revolution is presented as a perfect approach and socialism as an ideal system--yet as one professor of French pointed out to me, the fall of the Soviet Union makes it quite clear that socialism has defects that need to be analyzed. Similarly, young people in Cuba think the world outside Cuba is perfect, that one arrives in Miami and manna falls from heaven. It's not all that different from what my own great grandparents thought, true. But Cubans haven't been taught to listen and consider alternate perspectives, and according to this French professor, the country will only improve once Cubans are able to analyze socialism's flaws directly and honestly instead of blaming everything wrong on the U.S. embargo, an easy scapegoat. A friend told me yesterday that Cubans will even blame bad weather on the Embargo--and no system can improve if people are unable to look at it for what it is instead of blaming an easy culprit.

For me, this double moral is an endless frustration. I've met only one dissident willing to talk at all, and I've only managed to film a VERY small number of interviews because people are scared to death they'll end up in trouble with the state, even in jail. How often that really happens, no one seems to know, but the fear that it could happen is intense. I was thrilled when Caridad said she could be honest on film because if she was being honest, she'd defend her perspective to the end. But that's a lot easier for her to say as an 81-year-old woman who generally supports the Revolution--people who don't are in a very different situation. A transvestite friend said she didn't feel comfortable being interviewed this trip because she'd recently been included in a documentary on social problems in Cuba, which was aired by a Spanish-language network in the U.S. She wasn't the center of the program, but she's had nothing but problems with the state since, and the fact that she has illegal breast implants and now can't hide herself at all means she sleeps all day, only going out at night anymore. Even a very pro-Revolutionary university professor I've known for seven years refused to be filmed--and when I asked why, he skirted the question, saying that this was ¨a very delicate time¨ in Cuba's relationship with the world. Cubans are terrified to say what they think, and I've had dozens of people refuse interviews until their associations or unions give them permission. Others will talk, but get nervous the minute I ask for names and birthdates, begging me not to include any personal details in my work.

All of this has to mean that people don't agree with the system, or they'd be openly pro-Revolution, which is totally safe. But that means I can't even tell if Revolutionaries are really Revolutionaries--they could easily be saying they support the system and love Fidel and Raul because they know they're supposed to. One man told me that what Cubans do best is applaud--they're taken in trucks to rallies where they applaud on command and shout ¨Patria o muerte, venceremos -- Country or death, we'll overcome¨ as they're taught to do in kindergarten (yes, I've seen five-year-olds claim they'd die for their country--there's obviously something wrong there).

The French professor, who I'm not naming for obvious reasons, told me he doesn't want to see socialism traded for capitalism, saying no Cuban wants to change one collar for another. But he also said that the system needs to improve significantly, that Cubans need to learn from what went wrong in the former Soviet Union so the same doesn't happen here. Without the financial muscle Venezuela has, Cuba needs to find an economic middle ground that encourages and rewards hard work. Marx's idea that each should earn according to his capacity and work hasn't been followed here, and Raul Castro even recongnized this in his speech to the country on July 26th, 2007. Key liberties like freedom of speech and freedom of the press also need to be developed so that critical dialogue can begin. But these freedoms will be even harder to achieve after 50 years of debateless education, and real relativism could take decades to develop again.

I feel terribly lucky today to live where I do, to have the right to recognize and express what I consider unjust. Ana and I add two more pictures of Ella to the collage on the CDR reception desk, one with me in it, and I think about the education she'll receive, filled with all of the paradoxes, contradictions and flaws of real human experience across the world. Sometimes it saddens me that she'll have to confront the truth about the ugly underbelly of human nature, the real grit of those who only live to survive, but at least she'll know the truth when she sees it, and she'll be allowed to criticize it. Ana points to a Che quotation, laughing--¨This one I believe,¨ she tells me, and I know it's a real truth: ¨Behind every extremist is an opportunist.¨