And what were the revolutionaries like? They were pretty interesting. First of all, they had no ideas of their own. They subscribed to Fidel's ideas across the board, and went as far as summing up that parasitic symbiosis in a deplorable refrain that they repeated at Revolution Square or posted at the doors of their houses: "If Fidel is a Communist! Put me on his list." Castro monopolized the function of thinking. One could not be a revolutionary and disagree with the official line, and the official line covered all of history. To be a revolutionary meant to believe what Castro thought of the past: that the republic was a sewer, a Yankee colony; that the revolutionaries had emerged from the best mambisa tradition of the ₁₉th century to save the Cubans from their unhappy contemporary abjection. You had to believe that the Cuban revolution had invented decency and dignity among the inhabitants of that land so ill-treated by Washington.

Castro was not only the master of the present, but of the past as well. He owned the past, and anyone advocating a conflicting interpretation was a dangerous, a "revisionist", "divisive". This was a serious sin. The Cubans could only survive as a historical entity if they held a univocal, concerted vision capable of protecting them like a magical amulet from the "gringos". The stubborn strategists of the Pentagon were patiently waiting, in hiding, for the Cubans to become divided, so that they could take over the island. That had been their intention during almost two centuries.

Pure historicism, a follower of Popper would say. The argument was too weak and relied on the presumed existence of a permanent conspiracy within the U.S. power structure which, neurotically, from generation to generation, transmitted the imperialist desire to dominate Cuba. Any intelligent person, even moderately well-informed, was bound to reject such a notion. Plus, why would a Marxist, convinced of the dialectical mechanisms that move the wheels of history, believe that Jefferson's temptation to annex Cuba - at a time when it was shockingly easy for Louisiana, Florida or entire countries in Europe to change hands due to wars or simply through marriages - could remained unchanged in the second half of the 20^th century? But, alarming as it was to find that being a proper revolutionary required understanding the past through Castro's arbitrary prism, what was even more upsetting was the obligation to share his view of the future. No one could speculate that events that had not yet occurred might turn out some other way, for that would lead to social ostracism or, in extreme cases, to jail. All projections as to what might lie ahead were designed by the Party, in accordance with the faithful interpretation of what Fidel had in store in his untidy mind. A revolutionary was expected to believe in the radiant destiny of communism and in the unquestionable triumph of the good Marxist forces against the evil demons of capitalism. And if any one in a classroom or in a workers' rally or an official meeting dared to shyly express an opinion that the economic, scientific and technological symptoms pointed in a different direction, and that it seemed that communism showed huge contradictions and weaknesses that did not predict a splendid future, that person was immediately stigmatized and excluded from the group. Castro was also master of tomorrow.

And this is where the New Man makes his triumphant entrance. The New Man subscribes to Castro's worldview, adding certain attitudes and behavior that can only be considered angelic. The New Man is a man full of hope, disinterested, obedient, who has surrendered his mind to Fidel and the Party to be equipped with ideas, beliefs and judgments that match up minutely with the Party line, because he lacks the faculty of thinking with his own brain. He is a character who has also donated his arms to the revolution, who will work seven days a week - oh, those marvelous Red Sundays! - and will march with the militia on Saturdays without expecting any additional reward for his tireless labor. All he expects is moral compensation, as proclaimed by Che Guevara, because material incentives are just nauseating remnants of a capitalist past that will never come back. The New Man is, undoubtedly, a saint.

What happens to human beings who can't feel like heroes, revolutionaries or new men because they are too exhausted by the task of living and raising a family under increasingly precarious conditions? What happens to sensible people who simply can't endure so much foolishness and decide to silently flee the madhouse, claiming absolutely nothing except the clothes they are wearing and surrendering even their wedding rings to the implacable political police? Those people, in "normal" times, are punished in various ways for their disillusionment. They are fired from their jobs as if they have committed some horrible crime, their possessions are inventoried, and they are not al lowed to dispose of anything they owned - it all becomes the property of the people. Or they are sent to forced labor in "agricultural" tasks - to cut sugar cane, to harvest tobacco - in the countryside, where they must remain for months and even years "earning the right" to emigrate. Yet that is only what happens in "normal" and happy times.

In "abnormal" circumstances - when the government feels threatened or when Castro has suffered what he interprets as public humiliation in the eyes of people who ostensibly rejected his leader ship - at such times, beatings. insults, and spitting at the potential emigrants becomes legal. That was the case in the early 1980s, when the Mariel exodus took place. In just 72 hours, in a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of human desperation. 11,000 people sought refuge in the Peruvian embassy in Havana; it happened again in the 1990s, when the "boat people" crisis took place. It happened to television repairman Rafael Muiñas, one case in hundreds - and others werefatally worse. After humbly and quietly expressing his desire to leave the country because he was tired of the unsuccessful attempts at the Frankenstein-like genetic engineering of the New Man, Muiñas was forced to kneel on the sidewalk in front of his workplace with a poster hanging from his neck saying, "I'm a traitor." Then he was forced to crawl on his knees, while a mob yelled at him, beating him and spitting on him. Years later, as he recalled the story, his eyes would redden with feelings of outrage and bitterness.

Muiñas, like thousands of other Cubans, was the object of an "act of repudiation." What is that? A person or a family is brutally mobbed by a crowd organized by the Communist Party and the Security forces, giving the impression that the people are so outraged that they take justice into their own hands against the "social degenerates." It's not the police nor the army, but "the revolutionary people" who "spontaneously" come out to settle things with those who try to be different, dare have a different opinion or try to flee the country because they can no longer tolerate the contradictions. How is the "act of repudiation" carried out? The police select the victim - a dissident, a non conformist journalist, an intellectual who expresses a critical view, or a simple worker who opts not to go on living in that marvelous paradise. They call together the Communist Party thugs, and they explain to them the extent of the operation.

If the victim is well-known, even the leaders may be called upon to perform. The act of repudiation against the Arcos brothers, Sebastián and Gustavo - the prestigious human rights defenders and heroes of the 26 of July - was personally led by Roberto Robaina when he was the Secretary General of the Union of Communist Youth. An act of repudiation can be limited to yelling and insults, as it was done for weeks against the Catholic leader Dagoberro Valdés and his family, or the mob can be incited to enter the house of the repudiated person and destroy the few pieces of furniture he owns. Even more severe treatments may be applied. María Elena Cruz Varela, the great poet who received the National Literature Prize, was forcibly hauled out of her house, dragged to the middle of the street, thrown to her knees, and forced to eat her own manuscripts while the mob yelled, "Let her mouth bleed, damn it, let it bleed!" And then she was accused of public disorder and sentenced to two years in prison. After the international protest gained noticeable proportions, an old woman who was a Party member and had not even taken part in the mob, met with the media blaming herself for what had happened and explaining that she just couldn't accept in silence the "María Elena Cruz Varela's provocations and her counter revolutionary writings." It was merely the voice of the police rewriting history.

Why carry out these uncivilized "acts of repudiation" when the government, which controls the lawmakers, the courts and the media, could discreetly arrest the victim, conduct a brief trial under trumped charges and sentence him or her to whatever time the police decide? Because that is not what the acts of repudiation are about. Their aim is not only to punish a person gone astray, but to convey an intense intimidating message to the population. The arrest, trial and imprisonment of dissidents and a brief report of the incident published in Granma does not carry the same profound dissuasive effect. When neighbors watch the mob arrive and brutally beat the defenseless victim, with the absolute impunity of the para-police force, it is another story. And this is not even a Cuban invention. In the sad jargon of Cuban repression experts it is known as the "control techniques of Kristall nacht," an allusion to what Hitler did in the 1930s against the Jews, using his ferocious black shirts. On a specified date, the Nazi mobs would go to the houses or shops of thousands of Jews and destroy their property, before the eyes of the entire terror-stricken, paralyzed society. The Jews were the direct victims, but the real aim was far broader - to show every German, Jewish or not, who owned the streets and to demonstrate that the group in power was beyond the law. The immediate purpose was, of course, to humiliate the Jews, but also to frighten everyone else.

These acts of repudiation are not the only technique that Castro learned from Nazism. The Cuban political police, whose structure and training is based on the East German Stasi, took from the Nazis a repressive element that did not exist in the other Communist countries - the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. The CDR (in its Spanish acronym) is the basic unit of repression in Cuba. It is an espionage network managed by the Ministry of the Interior, with thousands of units throughout the island. There is one on every block, and if you don't want to be considered a dangerous outcast, it's best to sign up and participate actively. Besides keeping alive the "ideological purity" of the revolution by indoctrinating citizens (who are forced to study and accept the official government views in every aspect of existence), the CDRs' mission is to monitor the lives of all the citizens. Who is living in a given house, who are their visitors, what are their religious beliefs, what letters do they receive and where from, how do they express themselves about the revolution and its leaders, do they have relatives who oppose the revolution or live in exile, or are they exemplary revolutionaries? It may also be convenient to know who sleeps with whom, or what are the sexual preferences of the neighbors, their social customs, what they eat - especially if it is "illegal," as is the ease of seafood or meat - which can be known by the scraps in the garbage bags. One never knows what use the intelligence forces can give to such "sensitive" information.

Nobody knows for sure who, within the CDR, are direct informants. Yet every Cuban knows that the CDR spies on everyone, and is, in turn, spied upon. Novelist Eliseo Alberto was recruited by the intelligence forces to spy on his own father, the poet Eliseo Diego. And he did it, as he tells it in Informing Against Myself, a heartrending book published in Spain. Mutual distrust is one of the consistent elements of totalitarian societies, and the first thing families teach the children is to distrust and to pretend, for the child's chances of not running afoul of the repressive machinery will depend on his skills in those two behaviors. At the same time, that family training, the development of cynicism and lying as means of protection, helps convince the child that the system is invincible and that it would be futile to try to oppose it. There is no sense in fighting. Survival is achieved by faking it. There is no point in running risks by defending dangerous principles. Sacrificing oneself for others - in a community of informers - would be idiocy. It's sad, but the same situation has been experienced in societies that have lived under communism: characters educated in duplicity and lying tend to manifest themselves in a lack of shared sympathy and indifference, the behavior of those who don't believe in anything or anybody - exactly the opposite of the Marxist project of building a world ruled by fraternal bonds.

How is this repressive machinery structured? Every CDR regularly reports to a zone committee, which in turns reports to a municipal, then a provincial, and finally a national committee. From the zone committee, all the information is gathered by the professional police officers, who feed the insatiable computers of the Ministry of the Interior. No one can escape its magnifying glass. Everyone has a political dossier. Even the most harmless citizen has an assigned officer in charge of monitoring his file, simply because you never know where an enemy of the fatherland may be hiding. And the term "everyone" includes minors, for the cumulative dossier begins the moment when the child is registered in school. On that registration form, notes indicate whether the parents are under suspicion of serving the imperialists or are brave soldiers in the revolutionary struggle. The term "everyone" does not even exclude illustrious visitors, like the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, who tells about the overflowing folder containing notes on every contact and every bit of information about his multiple stays on the island, as well as transcripts of his telephone conversations. This was revealed by a young man named Antonio "Tony" Valle Vallejo, a defector who had been part of García Márquez's intellectual circle in Cuba, where García Márquez circulated in a carefree and irresponsible way - unaware that his hosts spied on him and followed him closely, minute by minute.

These CDRs were the organizations that, in the 1960s, compiled lists of youths to be taken to forced-labor camps where rough military treatment was to reeducate and convert them from "antisocial" beings into radiant New Men. These terrible agricultural work camps - euphemistically called Military Units of Production Aid (UMAP in its Spanish acronym) were fenced in barbed wire and managed by a whack of the rifle-butt. 50,000 Cubans were condemned, accused by anonymous spies of being or of resembling homosexuals, Catholics, Protestants, or - those subjected to the harshest punishments-Jehovah's Witnesses and Seven-Day Adventists. This phenomenon was explored by filmmakers Néstor Almendros, Orlando Jiménez Leal and Jorge Ulla in the documentary films Improper Conduct and Nobody Listened.

The "crimes" could even be less apparent - wearing "suspicious" clothes, reading "weird" books, or not showing respect toward the symbols of the Revolution, as in the case of the composer/singer Pablo Milanés, who was interned in those rural prisons because the CDR members on his block decided that in some oblique way his songs concealed "counterrevolution, homosexuality, or both." Many of those youths, like the writer José Antonio Zarraluqui, never knew why they had been taken to the UMAP camps, but they will never forget the things that were done to them - from a Jehovah's Witness who was buried up to his neck until he learned that it was better to renounce his religious beliefs than endure the stings of the fire ants on his face, to a homosexual who was kicked in the back until his spine was fractured, for refusing to shave his gloriously colored hair.

This repressive organization, the CDR, is more Nazi-Fascist than Leninist. It was founded on two hypotheses, which regrettably history has confirmed. The first hypothesis is that in a totalitarian state, the ties of complicity are strengthened if all the participants are equally guilty, having stained their hands in "the enemy's" blood. Everyone has to throw stones. Everyone has to repress each other, and this shared dirty work turns into an obscure moral vehicle. It is not possible to be a Cuban revolutionary and stay out of immoral tasks. You can't be a revolutionary by supporting the regime's efforts in education or health care, while rejecting the repressive aspects. Such ethical finesse is not al lowed. One must be a revolutionary in all circumstances and with all the consequences: one must exult the obsessive vigilance, the denunciations, the "actos de repudios", the execution squads, and the growing ranks of political prisoners. That's the way revolutions are, and perhaps it is this fatal tension that explains the high number of suicides in the Revolution's hierarchy. In Cuba, none less than President Osvaldo Dorticós has taken his own life, as well as Haydee Santamaría, the tragic heroine of the Moncada attack and a sister-in-law of Raúl Castro, plus so many others whose names now represent the problems of conscience that sometimes arise out of cooperating with the executioners. When the very competent scientist trained in Cuba - Mayda Donate, a Communist Party member - escaped to exile in the 1990s, she brought documentation that corroborated the facts previously provided by the sociologist Norma Rojas. The rate of suicides in Cuba is among the highest in the world - three times the average for Latin America - but among women, it is even worse. In no society on this planet are so many women killed as in Cuba.

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