Cuba Will Not Be Freed by a Funeral

Cuba Will Not Be Freed by a Funeral

Those of us who wait for his last breath are looking in the wrong place. Cuba will not be freed by a funeral. It will be freed when the people still living on the island decide they have had enough of the experiment. That is Poland’s hard lesson.

Poland’s Hard Lesson

After World War II, the Soviet Union imposed a communist government on Poland. The Polish United Workers’ Party monopolized power. The security services and the army answered to the party. The country was locked into the Warsaw Pact. Workers rose in Poznań in 1956 and on the Baltic coast in 1970. They were crushed. What they left behind was not victory, but memory: distrust of the regime and a habit of organized protest.

Poland did not overthrow communism in one dramatic night. It wore the system down. A mass civic movement—Solidarity—grew out of the shipyards after a decade of underground papers, parish meetings, and factory committees. The Church gave it moral cover. An economic collapse made the party’s promises look like a joke. Moscow, under Gorbachev, would no longer send tanks. In 1989, the regime was forced to the Round Table. Semi-free elections followed. Solidarity won almost every seat it was allowed to contest. Within months, a non-communist prime minister took office. The “leading role” of the party was struck from the constitution. The yoke broke from inside.

No foreign army did that. Poles did.

Suffering Is Not the Same as Power

Cuba today is closer in misery to that kind of breaking point than many exiles want to admit—and farther in organization than many hope. The failed state is doing what failed states do. Blackouts last through the night and into the next day. Food and medicine vanish. Water stops. Families sleep on rooftops to escape the heat. Well over a million have already voted with their feet. There have been pot-banging protests, street shouts for light and bread, and the same old answer: police, silence, prison.

Suffering is not the same as power. Poland teaches that the opening comes when suffering turns into organization, when workers, neighbors, and parishioners stop waiting for a strongman to die and start making the regime ungovernable on its own terms: neighbors who will not inform, parishes that keep the names of the detained, workers who stop pretending the official union is theirs. Foreign pressure can squeeze a dictatorship. It cannot substitute for a people who refuse to live as subjects. A people does not become ungovernable only from hunger, but from the conviction that they were not made to live that way.

The yoke will be broken when a majority on the island decides that another ration of darkness and silence is no longer survivable—and acts on that decision. Not because Miami wishes it. Not because Washington threatens it. Because Cubans still in Cuba demand it.

When Will They Have Had Enough?

The question is not whether Raúl Castro has another public appearance left in him, and it is not whether Cuba will not be freed by a funeral is merely a slogan. The question is older and harder: when will they have had enough?

This is the question that has followed me since 1962, when my mother and I escaped from Cuba, and what led me to write of Alejandro’s Journey: not when the old men leave the stage, but when Cubans still in Cuba decide the experiment is finished. Exile can keep the memory. Only the people who remain can break the yoke.

Gerardo Manuel Fundora
Miami Lakes, Florida