In his article entitled “Social Control in Cuba,” Benigno E. Aquirre considers why the Communist Cuban state has been so successful maintaining social control in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Cuba has persisted despite blockade, embargo, natural disaster and, most damaging of all, the loss of its great patron state, the Soviet Union. The United States, sensing a historic opportunity to crush opposition and the hated Castro regime, stepped up economic and political pressure on Cuba after 1989. The Marxist-Leninist haven that Fidel Castro envisioned has been forced to adopt a realist, survival-oriented course of action over the past three decades in order to maintain social control and stave off economic implosion. The Cuban regime has proven resilient and resourceful at applying reactive (some might say “band aid”) solutions in the face of increasing socio-economic pressures that come from outside the country and which are, ultimately, beyond the government’s control to stop.
Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuban citizens could count on “social welfare and other benefits of the revolution” (Aguirre, 88). This is no longer the case and, consequently, Cuba has seen a surge in “civil society and (an) increase in the occurrence of noninstitutionalized collective behavior” (Aguirre, 88). Yet the Castro regime has succeeded for years at blending totalitarian controls and effective appeals for a dogmatic ideology. Clearly, the Cuban government has understood the importance of political legitimacy, even under the most desperate circumstances. Aguirre argues that the notion of social control “becomes blurred in societies like Cuba, where both are made part of a state-sponsored, centralized, planned program for preserving the legitimacy of the ideology of the leading class and its domination over the
society” (87).
The government has succeeded at marginalizing civil dissatisfaction, at diffusing undercurrents of unrest and avoiding the coalescence of a unified social movement. “In Cuba, the ability of social control systems to neutralize social movement organizations has pushed dissent and civil society into less-organized and less-institutionalized forms, such as mass behavior, riots, and rumors” (Aguirre, 87). So long as social dissatisfaction took this form, the totalitarian Cuban state was well-positioned to maintain social control. Aguirre points out that in Cuba no form of protest can emerge from the normal political processes; there are no political processes, at least not in the sense that emerged in other countries such as, for example, the American Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century. For the people of Cuba, “collective protests are not part of normal politics or of interest group politics. Instead, their participation in collective action and the emergent civil society is risky behavior undertaken in an unsupportive political climate” (Aguirre, 87).
That Cuba has, since the revolution, been a patchwork of social and political expediencies is a matter of survival. To that end it has melded a hodge-podge of formal and informal systems of social control and, rather than seeking to resolve a national political structure and a centrally planned society, has made inconsistency work to its advantage, “as part of a more or less cogent national cultural policy” (Aguirre, 69). Xianglin writes that the government has survived due largely to its leveraging of certain controlled economic reforms (104). More than this, it has enlivened “an ideology, a system of symbols and meanings employing rhetorical devices, used by the government to ‘establish and sustain relations of domination’” (Aguirre, 69).
References
Aguirre, B.E. “Social Control in Cuba.” Latin American Politics in Society, 44(2).
Xianglin, M. “Cuban Reform and Economic Opening: Retrospective and Assessment.” Latin
American Perspectives, 34(93), 2007.
