Cuba: The Doctrine of The Lie

By Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat

Cuba: The Doctrine of the Lie is a thoroughly researched and profoundly revealing work on two themes of vital importance to the world today: the true nature of totalitarianism and how religion, philosophy, culture, tradition, and individual freedom are the most effective antibodies for countering this deadly ontological virus. Approaching Cuba’s history as both a rallying icon for the radical left and an engine of freedom activism for the powerful Cuban-American community in the United States, this study helps dispel the black legend about life in Cuba before the communist triumph in 1959, reveals the destructive ideology behind the façade of Che Guevara’s socialism, explains how so-called agrarian reform camouflaged the structuring of a police state, and provides unique insights into the dynamics of the struggle of the Cuban Resistance. Cuba: The Doctrine of the Lie explains how totalitarianism was established and consolidated in Cuba and assesses the repercussions that event has had for America’s domestic ideological spectrum. Resulting from personal conversations with key actors, research into original sources, and a thorough knowledge of Cuban history, this book represents a vital contribution not just to the field of studies of totalitarianism but also to the study of Cuban history as a whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781680537437

Book preview

Chapter One

The Totalitarian Entity:Revolution, Nationalism, and Totalitarianism in The 20th Century

The idea that a single and total view of the world could be universally imposed by a brutal police regime was a new political fate in the modern world.

Lesly Chamberlain, Lenin’s Private War

A new type of state: 20th century totalitarian systems

The 20th century witnessed a series of revolutions that transformed the history of humanity and set new trends in the politics and economies of nation-states. If the 19th century was the century of the affirmation of individual freedoms, the 20th century was marked by the emergence of the masses as political actors. The psychological physiognomy of the masses defined a new type of ultrapowerful state.

Perhaps for this same reason, most of these transformative 20th century revolutions corrupted into authoritarian/revolutionary or totalitarian states. They shared common ideological fundamentals and similar methodologies. They have all fed off each other strategically and logistically, joining in a worldwide ideological family.

The question we pose in this essay is whether the substantial being of this body of ideas has its own existence, deeply connected to and feeding from the dynamic currents residing in the consciences of nations.

Does totalitarianism share a common fiber with the nature of reality itself, within the dimensional horizon that exists beyond the temporal plane?

What we seek to carry out in this analysis is an ontological study of the very nature of being of the great totalitarian states that emerged in the 20th century and their underlying ideologies.

The historical pathologies of each totalitarian ideology are similar. All have a common root in Marxism.¹ This role of Marxism as the incubator of totalitarianism present and future has been widely studied by scholars in relevant disciplines.

However, as Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony stressed, If Marxism is only but a great lie, why are liberal societies so vulnerable to it? We need to understand the attraction and the durable forces of Marxism.²

The Great Revolutions

The great revolutions of the 20th century under our purview are the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), Russian Revolution (1917), Fascist Revolution (1922), Nazi Revolution (1933), Chinese Revolution (1949), Cuban Revolution (1959) and Iranian Revolution (1979). We will not delve deeply into the Vietnamese Revolution as its characteristics clearly fall in the field of wars of independence, which requires a separate analysis.

All these revolutions evolved into totalitarian states. Each had their singular characteristics but shared a common general profile. All of them have had a profound impact in their region, and above all, in the struggle against the international community of democracies led by the U.S.

Going beyond the myths and propaganda of their originators, there are identical fundamental notions in these processes. For example, they do not represent processes in which nationalism, socialism or "the people" faced off against foreign-style forms and norms rather than national ones. What happened in most cases was that two or even three different overlapping nationalistic or ideological interpretations confronted each other.

Additionally, and beyond ideological confrontations, there is an underlying substance in all these regimes that answers to an identical fundamental being; a being fed by the very same body of ideas and experiences. A being which has partaken of a distortion of the stream of consciousness on the way towards its flourishing of potential.

Agents of Change

Totalitarian movements have developed in top-down fashion in society. Almost all these movements began under the leadership of elitist intellectuals, members of the middle or high classes, later to be joined by sectors from the working classes.

The announced objective of these movements in their initial stages was political reform. As the process developed, and the respective factions began to push for their agendas of change, radical elements revealed their true intentions. They remained faithful to the Leninist script of establishing and perfecting a new type of dictatorship.³

As a result of this methodology, reformist leaders generally ended up murdered (Madero), exiled (Kerensky), or jailed (Húber Matos). Totalitarians had another great factor in common: Lenin’s teachings, assimilated by both Fascists as well as Communists, who recognized in him the true architect of the totalitarian state.⁴

Total war doctrine, particularly total civil war, became a key tool for the advancement of totalitarianism in almost all cases. Totalitarianism needs to fragment society as it is in order to control it. Particularly as the fundamental basis for totalitarian war speech. "Lenin himself was undoubtedly convinced that the best hope to widen the small power base of his party was to undertake a civil war."⁵

Lenin understood, after the electoral defeat suffered by the Bolsheviks in the Constitutional Convention of 1917, that they would not be able to participate in or win future elections.⁶ More than 40 years later, Fidel Castro was one such follower of this example.

Not only that, but Figes observes that all of Lenin’s policies, from the shutting down of the Constituent Assembly to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, can be explained as a deliberate attempt to incite a civil war.⁷ It was from the starting point of this war, and the peculiar conditions emerging from it, that the new totalitarian order could be structured.

The coup d’état towards power in (Russia)⁸ or from power in (Cuba) was the key step in the consolidation of power.

The complicity of the Free World

In almost all cases, indecision, weakness, and even collaboration from Free World elements was a key to the ascendance of absolute power for totalitarians.

In many cases, such as in the Russian, Chinese or Cuban cases, the international ideological apparatus of Communism and the Soviet Intelligence Service played a key role in weakening the West’s posture in the face of totalitarians.

Why was this possible?

Violence as a doctrinal fundamental

Violence is an axiomatic component of the doctrine of totalitarian movements. It is within violence as a negation of the other, and not in the affirmation of being through the search for a transcendental truth, where these totalitarian movements find the creative energy and discipline to do and undo the universe.⁹

As Mao Zedong taught to that effect:

Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in a class society; without them, it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes, and therefore impossible for people to win political power.¹⁰

Above all, totalitarianism finds violence indispensable in terms of doctrine and philosophy. There is a need to negate transcendence, to mutilate the human being so that he or she may be accommodated to the totalitarian design. Mutilating human beings for Marxism destroys the basis of the culture and civilization that frames and empowers the development of the human conscience.

This was established early on in the totalitarian canon by Lenin. With the publication of his philosophical work Materialism and Empiricism in 1909, he established that he hated religion and its preachers.¹¹

Marxism, Castroism and totalitarianism in general are spiritually void because in none of the parameters of their narratives do they venture to provide an identity that can stand on its own in its definition of being and conscience.

The identity generated is a reactive one, based on the negation of the other, in the construction of a permanent enemy. In this fashion, a pseudo-identity that is capable of being manipulated to suit totalitarian doctrines is developed.¹²

Totalitarianism deprives a citizen of their own power over themselves, while conferring on this same oppressed citizen, significant power over his fellow citizens upon becoming a collaborator in state represssion. Under the shadow of the totalitarian state, a citizen can easily destroy the life of his neighbor, purportedly for the common good, all the while having little to no power to control his own life.

There are also nonalienated sectors of society, such as the elite movers and shakers, that the totalitarian movement either sweeps away in the early phases or, if too powerful, amalgamates into the system.

Totalitarianism And Nationalism

In all this, the ability of the totalitarian movement to define and interpret the ideal of national aspiration plays a vital role.

Almost all nations affected by first generation totalitarianism were countries that inherited a great past of civilization and hoped to reestablish what they believed to be their natural role in the world as dominant powers.¹³ These nations referred to, had experienced difficulty in conforming into a modern, representative national state under liberal norms.

In other words, these countries display a certain type of leadership, a charisma, that attracts historical and international forces to them. These energies must be considered an objective phenomenon that must be incorporated into the study of totalitarian regimes.

In these nations, there was a Gordian knot of perceived potentialities, not yet realized, of aspirations unfulfilled in the face of institutional frustrations. This created a type of collective inferiority complex, a sense the nation was not living up to its past glories and future potential.¹⁴

Totalitarian movements were able to sense these wishes, transforming them into the pillars of their doctrines. They build their movements into cohesive state-controlling forces, not by glorifying personal and collective freedoms, but from the desire for greatness of a national entity: This constitutes an exacerbation of the ego that expands into the realm of metaphysics. It is Luciferian in nature.

These movements utilized their own conception of greatness to present themselves as having been the catalyst in the arrival of the nation at the definitive stage of its historical and spiritual development. The totalitarian state projects the absorption of society within the functions of the state, and the elimination of citizen autonomy, as a special right conferred by destiny upon the movement.

This, in turn, results in aggressive behavior both domestically, and against its neighbors.

All those daring opposition inside the country or within the nationality were labeled by totalitarians as class enemies or as the anti-nation. A human detritus passed over or discarded by history, and hence subject to being stripped of all rights, which, in the totalitarian conception, are always historical in origin as opposed to originating in nature.

The Psychology of Totalitarian Control

Verbal and physical violence also served totalitarians to apply the Scapegoat Mechanism as was explained by philosopher René Girard:

in primitive societies, periodically a common enemy was created which was blamed for all the ills of society and whose destruction in a collective act serves to strengthen the bonds of unit of that very society. Girard argued that with the historical emergence of Christianity, with its theology of redemptive sacrifice, and of the forgiveness for transgressions, this mechanism had been transformed. The denunciation of injustice became part of the national history, of the resources of reason in a peoples.¹⁵

Totalitarianism reverts to this very same primitive mechanism by means of stripping away the humanity of those who oppose the system.

This is the narrative used to justify and explain away all manner of cruelty against human groups who disapprove of the state while forging unifying ties among those who submit and participate in the new order. It was also the ‘scientific’ justification to erase all those who opposed the totalitarian system from official memory.

This guilt mechanism unifies the members of the totalitarian apparatus. This unity is consolidated with the underlying awareness that terrible crimes have been committed in common by all, and that, if totalitarian unity were lost, all the members of the apparatus would have to respond individually, and not as a group for these crimes whish are an evident affront to human nature.

In this way, totalitarianism rejects the existence of a moral nature in humanity, yet, however, its control mechanism is based precisely on the manipulation of this moral nature of the species. This apparent contradiction is essential in order to understand its modus operandi and its true essence. At its very core, totalitarianism appears to be aware that it must occupy a space that transcends it.

Totalitarian movements knew how to channel some of the highest and most noble aspirations of organic national sentiment in order to distort them and achieve consolidation of absolute power. With a nationalist discourse, they attract the people; and with the methodic application of the scapegoat mechanism, they destroy the very same representative institutions that help a people remain a people. In a self-reinforcing spiral, the totalitarians activated passion to suppress reason, turning a people into a mass, and then empowering this mass to destroy individuality.

Our considerations:

The Clash of Nationalisms

In most of these processes it was not about a clash between national factors and non-national ones or between the people and an oligarchy. It was about a clash between nationalisms, understood as a confrontation between different ways of feeling, understanding and interpreting the nation. This was accompanied by a political wish to completely dominate the channeling of the energies of the national state.

The metaphysics of totalitarianism reside in its insatiable appetite for power, which transcends any urge for domination as had been previously known to humanity.

In the case of Mexico, for example, Madero led a middle-class sector that emerged under the aegis of Porfirio Díaz. This emerging politically active middle class aspired to effect a liberal reform of the authoritarian state headed up by Díaz. Madero’s effort was quickly overwhelmed by Communist forces on one hand, and by the personal aspirations of several generals on the other.

There was also a strong movement of peasant claims that rallied under Zapata’s banner to fight against Benito Juárez’s agrarian reforms. This chaos paved the way for a prolonged civil war then followed by a second civil war, the war of the Cristeros.

The consolidation of a totalitarian state was stopped by the tenacious resistance of the Mexican people. The PRI party ended up forming an authoritarian-corporative state dressed up as a democracy, which Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa’s would later label as the "perfect dictatorship.¹⁶

However, organic national forces prevailed, even within the scope of the authoritarianism of the ruling party, the PRI. As a result, after the Cristero uprising the Mexican dictatorship never resorted to the rigor of totalitarian regimes engendered by the rest of these totalitarian revolutions.

Russia

In the case of Russia, there existed, and still exists, in the so called White movement, an anti-Communist strain of nationalism that tenaciously opposed the Bolsheviks.

This White movement, which counted on great thinkers of the stature of Struve or Ilynn, with great generals such as Denikin and Wrangel, and a respected leader of national scope such as Kolchak, was based on the mystical doctrine of The Third Rome. This doctrine held that Russia was called upon to follow the legacy of Rome and of Constantinople in defense of universal Christendom, and that this mission would consecrate the state.¹⁷

The three pillars of autocratic Russian Nationalism were (are?) "Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Narodnost (doctrine or Russian national principle)." All expressions were impregnated either by a profound skepticism about the viability of democracy in Russia or by a doctrinal rejection of it.¹⁸

White Russian nationalism has been a persistent movement in Russia and its diaspora throughout the last century until today. Up to the 1930s and 1940s, the Communist regime had to confront several types of armed resistance in its territory. Tsarist White forces were not formally defeated until the 1923 Far East Expedition. There was an important armed peasant rebellion in Tambov (1920-21), which turned this region into a permanent anti-Soviet area, lasting up to the fall of the USSR itself.¹⁹

One of the most successful Russian anti-Soviet resistance groups was the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, which survived all types of Soviet repression in and out of Russia, while maintaining a continuous fight against Communism. Solidarists on many occasions had an effective impact on anti-Communist efforts in the U.S. and in the West.²⁰

The White Russian movement’s nationalism is an integral perspective in the conscience of the Russian nation. Stalin tried to appropriate a part of it through the use of the slogan National Communism or National Bolshevikism²¹ or by means of the doctrine of Smena Vekh, Change of Century espoused by the expatriated philosopher Nikolay Vasilyevich Ustryalov.²²

Smena Vekh held that National Bolskevikism was only but a step in the path of attaining a Great Russia. With this goal, Bolshevism should be temporarily and tactically supported by the White movement in defense of Mother Russia. Inevitably, according to this doctrine, Bolshevism would be overtaken by the universal mission of Russia, by its irreversible national teleology.²³ Smena Vekh was a Hegelian and non-Marxist way of understanding Russian historical dialectics. At a given time, even Nikolai Berdyaev participated in it,²⁴ having been one of its originating influences.²⁵

The staying power of the Russian White movement as opposed to Red Russian communist forces is seen in the way Vladimir Putin has embraced part of its message in order to establish his legitimacy. Putin’s actions show that he understands it to be a primary ideology within the Russian psyche. For example, it is interesting to note how Putin’s strategic plans reflect the political postulates of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists or NTS, possibly the most combative and long-standing of all White exile organizations,²⁶ and the only one that was able to reestablish itself in Russia after the fall of Communism.

The NTS rejected class struggle, aspiring for Russia to have harmonious social relationships by means of a strong national state. It did not share the ideals of liberal individualism and social pluralism of the West. The Solidarists believed in liberty for Russia, although not in limitless freedom. It did not aspire to become a multi-party capitalist system. Companies would be controlled by the state. The Orthodox Church would have a dominant historical position in the religious life of the country.²⁷

Just as was the case with the NTS, Putin seems to be an authoritarian, not a totalitarian.²⁸

One of the White intellectuals closest to the NTS, the philosopher Ivan Il’yn, has been one of the exiled thinkers most referred to by Putin.²⁹ He cites Ivan Il’yn frequently in his speeches and even brought back to Russia his mortal remains, interring them with honors³⁰ alongside several White generals.³¹

Also, under Putin’s direction, Russian TV produced an epic, hagiographic presentation of Admiral Kolchak’s life, the closest the White movement had to a supreme leader, entitled The Admiral (2008). Beautifully done, the film received a slew of awards.

Another important ideology within Russia today is Euro-Asianism. Perhaps one of the main intellectual exponents of Euro-Asian Russian nationalism today would be Professor Alexander Dugin.³² This school of thought conceives of Russia as a unique entity which brings together new civilization elements of both the Western and Eastern worlds.

Iran

The doctrine that underlay the Shah’s rule in Iran was based on the recovery of Iranian nationalism rooted in the Persian civilization that existed before the advent of Islam.³³ The Shah sought to base his ideology on an integration of Iranian monarchic nationalism, the ancient religious doctrine of Zoroaster and the more recent development of the Shi’a Muslim religion.³⁴

The Shah and his followers understood Iran to be a great power, interested in regaining its place in the world. This also affected the religious interpretation of the monarchy within this national tradition. Islam, predominant in Iran as Shi’a Islam, retains elements of Zoroastricism to such a point that some refer to it as the Iranian religion.³⁵

To a