The Party Hasn’t Died, It’s Rotted Alive

The Party Hasn't Died, It's Rotted Alive / Jose Hugo Fernandez
Posted on September 7, 2013

HAVANA, Cuba , September, www.cubanet.org – Out of every ten members of
the Communist Youth League, when they get to the age when they should
become members of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP), or, on the contrary,
become politically deactivated, only two are willing to maintain their
membership; and of those two, only one ends up joining the ranks of the
CCP. It's an open secret racing through Havana these days. Meanwhile,
other classified information, that also passes through the gossip chain,
makes it clear that the Party is down to a conga step, whether by old
age or the death of its members, or the numerous requests to step down
for family reunification abroad, or simply because of disappointment.

At this rate, soon the regime's chieftains will have to order their
followers to take to the streets to collect aspiring communists, just as
they now stockpile little cans of beer from the trash to recycle them
for industry. They should also remodel that bubbly slogan according to
which men die but the Party is immortal, because although it's not dead
yet (and it just may not die on time, the Party is rotting alive.

This is a double oxymoron, I know, because in some sense if can't die
because it was born dead, nor can it rot because it was born rotten. But
the fact is that its old self-image as the revolutionary vanguard of the
people has been hopelessly hurled over the precipice. And despite how
much they try to hide their surprise, it is a well-known secret that the
chieftains are losing the very few hairs remaining on their heads
realizing the way in which the number of 800,000 Cuban communists (as
per Raul Castro's own declaration in April, 2011) keeps getting smaller
day by day.

Sean Penn, who has proven to be as good an actor as he is a stupid idiot
in politics, said recently that in free elections in Cuba the Communist
Party would win eighty percent of the vote. As soon as we stop laughing,
perhaps it's worth clarifying that, judging by the good news we hear,
not even eighty percent of the remaining members would now vote for
their own party, even if they do represent an insignificant number.

What's more, if before 1959 the Communist Party earned five percent of
Cubans' votes, that percentage seems an exaggeration this days. And at
the rate it's going, it will be one as well, even in the Party nuclei.

Not that the chieftains need a party to dominate Cuba. And much less so
now, when the strength of having existed so much time virtually, it is
passing from a solid to a gas. However, although it no longer has any
influence among the population, it continues to serve as a mask to
disguise their system of monarchical power, especially to their friends
and accomplices abroad, like Sean Penn, socialists from the belly button
down, who insist on seeing our dictatorship as a beacon, and the people
as animals in the zoo, who are attractive only when viewed from afar and
behind the bars.

Certainly it is a source of embarrassment when those who, from
Hollywood, or from American universities, or from their sanctums in
Europe or Latin American, or even from some prestigious international
organizations like the United Nations, persist in giving credit to a
tyrannical edict like that which orders us, through the fifth article of
the Constitution of the Republic, to see: "The Communist Party of Cuba,
following José Martí and Marxist-Leninist, the organized vanguard of the
Cuban nation, is the highest governing force of or our society and of
the State…"

Are they really ignorant, these gentlemen, of the historic and deeply
rooted lack of influence of the Party among our ordinary people? Not
now, not even in what we could call its better times. Meanwhile, the
more its membership expanded, the less effective and influential it was.
The more it is promoted by propaganda as the vanguard of the masses, the
less able it has been to attract by its virtues and examples. What the
Communists here should be to the leaders of the Revolution, with regards
to popular recognition and assimilation (not acclamation), has had to be
paid with a fictitious existence as a political party while serving as a
repressive instrument of power, more antagonistic as it becomes more
omnipresent. Don't Sean Penn and his gang know this?

Are they also unaware that always, but particularly so today, the ideas,
the plans, the dogmas of the Communist Party represent the most orthodox
and backward, schematic, rigid, intolerant, incontestable, sectarian,
the most obsolete of our contemporary history? Do they not also know
that, for most Cubans it does not and never has represented real power,
but rather nothing more than the uselessness and long and tedious
harangues with no substance?

I speak, of course, of the Party as an institution, as well as its
representatives in government, which have little to do with much of the
rank and file, usually unaware of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin…
simple ideologized game pieces, who acted and act from inertia,
following orders from above, and apparently only just now, in a rush,
perhaps, to reclaim their guts, having begun to think with their own heads.

From Cubanet

About the author

José Hugo Fernández is the author, among other works, of the novels El
clan de los suicidas, Los crímenes de Aurika, Las mariposas no aletean
los sábados and Parábola de Belén con los Pastores, as well as the story
collections La isla de los mirlos negros and Yo que fui tranvía del
deseo, and the book of chronicles Siluetas contra el muro. He lives in
Havana where he has worked as an independent journalist since 1993.

4 September 2013

Source: "The Party Hasn't Died, It's Rotted Alive / Jose Hugo Fernandez
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