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Cubans are accustomed to long processes of liberation. Before constituting itself a republican state in 1902, Cuba had many episodes of struggle to achieve freedom. It took eleven separatist and slavery-abolition conspiracies and uprisings, along with three full-fledged wars. Beginning with the Conspiracy of the Suns and Rays of Bolívar in 1823, the liberation effort lasted until the War of Independence concluded in 1898. Seventy-five years of grappling to be free, toiling with grave injustices, including full-blown concentration camp internments during the final belligerent war against the Cuban liberation army sympathizers. Cuba appears to be engaging in a rendezvous with history.
For the second time in its five hundred- and twenty-nine-year history, a decades-long liberation process has been unfolding and is showing signs of fruition. Communist tyrannical rule interrupted the course of an imperfect yet advancing liberal republic. The dictatorship that was installed in Cuba in 1959, like during the colonial period, always was challenged. Within days of the absolutist model the Castro brothers mounted, with the help of the Soviet Union and international communist influencers in the American media and government, resistance began.
As the Cuban Republic’s dismantling accelerated, opposition to the communist totalitarian regime increased. From the early urban clandestine forces to the peasant army which launched an active rural guerrilla war against Cuban communism in the Escambray Mountains and other parts of the Island until 1966, to the 2506 Brigade expeditionary forces, the hundreds of armed commando and small-unit incursions into Cuban territory, the campaign to affront the communist dictatorship throughout the world, including its foreign espionage operations as well as engaging in military confrontation in international war theaters in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, to the human rights endeavors that began in the 1980’s, Cubans have accepted their patriotic responsibilities all throughout Marxist-Leninism’s sixty-two year reign.
The 11th of July Cuban Popular Insurrection (11J) signaled a fundamental decay within Castro-Communist power. The success of totalitarian regimes rests in their effective and reliable ability to suppress society and keep them in check. Hundreds of thousands of youths born in captivity protesting in over fifty localities throughout every corner of Cuba, demanding “Freedom” and calling for an end to Marxist tyranny, is an evident sign of a seminal fissure in the repressive capacity to keep Cuban society in chains. Without a thorough capability of controlling social movement, totalitarian regimes lose their effectiveness. Massive crowds chanting in the public realm “Down with Communism”, an unequivocal call for systemic dismantling, tells us that totalitarian rule is crumbling.
The Civic March for Change scheduled for November 15 is a second wave of popular, public resistance to socialist despotism that is connected to the 11J liberty tsunami. Its success is already a fact. In dealing with regimes of total domination, when the oppressed opening defies state terrorism and subject themselves to decades-long prison sentences to garner civil and political spaces to exercise their natural rights and be free, it is only a matter of time before the totalitarian system collapses. Alienation, defenestration, and atomization have been useful tools help communism coordinate society and political power to suit their ends. These social symptoms of totalitarian culture are no longer in place in Cuba, to the degree that Castroism needs.
Liberation efforts are always a sequence of events, typically separated by spaces of time. For some it can longer than for others. Cubans have been fighting for freedom for over six decades. The world is witnessing Castro-Communism’s demise in course. The emancipation process has reached irreversible trends. There is no turning back.
Julio M Shiling, political scientist, writer, director of Patria de Martí and The Cuban American Voice, lecturer and media commentator. A native of Cuba, he currently lives in the United States. Twitter: @JulioMShiling // Julio es politólogo, escritor, director de Patria de Martí y The Cuban American Voice. Conferenciante y comentarista en los medios. Natural de Cuba, vive actualmente en EE UU.