The Cuban Revolution Today: Proposals of Changes, Scenarios, and Alternatives 49
Many of the problems confronted today have been considered
“youthful mistakes:” “Socialism is young,” “It was necessary to learn.”
“Innovation” has been used less for announcing the future than for
justifying the present: it has worked, really, as justification before a
failure that, it is promised, will not happen again in the “new stage in
which we are now” (Guanche, 2009a). The “Now We Will Achieve the
Promised Future” syndrome proposes agreement to accept a mistake,
almost always defined unilaterally, criticize it, and begin again. We
must bear in mind, however, that the origin of many of these mistakes
is the same: centralization, partiality, formalism in popular participa-
tion, bureaucratic planning, voluntary non-planning, narrowness of
the public sphere for social debate, conversion of social institutions
into agencies that overcome the citizens to “protect” the basic inter-
ests of the state.
The case of the Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata, deceased on Feb-
ruary 23 as a consequence of a hunger strike, and the case of his fol-
lower, Guillermo Fariñas, who abandoned a hunger strike in June
2010 after the release of the imprisoned dissidents, are undoubtedly
tragedies. Nevertheless, it is necessary to put this drama in its proper
perspective by analyzing the motivations underlying the media cam-
paign developed mainly in the newspapers and television in Spain and
Miami. First, the groups of Cuban opponents on the island share the
agenda of the anti-Castro organizations from Miami. Their new strat-
egy for overthrowing the revolution and restoring capitalism on the
island is a “pacific” one. They may differ on issues such as the block-
ade, which is rejected by the dissidents living in Cuba in contrast to
many of their allies in Miami. The ideology of the majority of these
dissident groups could be identified as center-right. In contrast to the
Cuban counterrevolution in the 1960s, which had a certain social base
and a considerable number of clandestine members and guerrillas in
the Sierra del Escambray, the current dissidents have no social base.
They suffer from a lack of leadership and from legitimacy in civil soci-
ety because of their inability to attract broader support (Hernández,
2010a). As Hernández describes them, their proposals have no coher-