Words are something unique to human beings. It is words, and not work (I disagree with Marx) that separates humankind from other living species on the planet. There are other animals that work in organized ways, with hierarchical structures (ants and bees, for example), but there are no others that can speak in an articulated way, as a conscious expression of their thinking. Parrots, as well as the representatives of the National Assembly, and the members of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba, limit themselves to repeating words or slogans, without expressing ideas as a result of a previous reasoning process.
Language is a dynamic element that has changed in different periods across the course of history. When human beings went from exploring the surface of the planet to delving into its depths, they went from Geography to Geology; when instead of gazing at the sky, they decided to explore it in spaceships, they went from Astronomy to Astronautics. Words reflect change, evolution or, conversely, immobility. The same is true of social language, which transforms along with new political and technological realities arising daily. A little over 15 years ago the term hashtag, denoting one of the most powerful communication tools in the modern world, was unknown to the millions of people who use it on a daily basis today. Twitter was created in 2006, and has now become X.
This capacity of words to influence people's attitudes defines the nature of the societies in which they live. Thus the extreme importance of freedom of expression and the existence of a free press in the development of a democracy. In Cuba, one of the dictatorship's first tasks was, precisely, to appropriate the people's universe of references by confiscating media, books and teaching materials of any kind. A literacy campaign taught thousands of Cubans to read and write, but through slogans related to the "Revolution," impressing upon them the idea of state under which individual freedoms have no place. Concepts like "human rights," "the rule of law", "the separation of powers" and "procedural guarantees" were erased from the Cuban intellectual universe and lexicon, just to point out some of the most important.
Language continues to be wielded as an instrument of subjugation today on the Island, although its effectiveness has been extremely undercut by the realities of the modern world. When Díaz Can-el said "We are continuity," he was repeating, like Nipster, the famous RCA Victor dog, the voice of his master; in this case, Raúl Castro. However, his words fell on deaf ears, since no one wants to continue with the regime's deceptive rhetoric, or receive top-down orders of the kind that were common before his time in office. One of the fundamental transformations of post-modern societies is a shift from vertical to horizontal communication. Current communication technologies allow people to talk to each other, in real time, with large numbers of participants not only receiving but also emitting information. People are no longer just communicational objects, but also subjects. This creates a sense of community, independence and empowerment.
Faced with a reality like this, the regime's usual instruments to control Cubans' consciousness have become obsolete, in many cases actually backfiring. Canel and his Lis (pardon the linguistic digression) are more famous for the memes they have sparked with their verbal blunders than for their attempts to "enlighten" the masses. Not even the threats to prosecute protesters have been taken seriously. The demonstrations continue, incorporating slogans like "Freedom," "Down with the dictatorship," "Turn on the electricity, dickhead" and "Díaz-Canel, son of a bitch." Everyday Cubans have learned how to use their language to project power in their environment.
While the people are demanding water, electricity, food, freedom and no more empty rhetoric, Díaz-Canel and his allies are asking the people for their confidence, and prosperity for a Cuba devastated by their inefficiency and indolence, with actions as surreal as praying before the statue of an Indian chieftain in Artemisa, Guillermo García's proposal to use hutias as a remedy for the food crisis, and the bizarre idea put forward by Díaz-Canel himself of resorting to voluntary work as a solution to the food crisis. All this comes from the mouths of pot-bellied neo-Castroist leaders sporting the latest trends in dictatorial fashion, with outlandish shirts and combat fatigues. The dictatorship's discourse is exhausted, fatigued; hence the fundamental fracture that is the source of all the anti-government demonstrations on the island. To round out this whole theater of the absurd there is the video of an inebriated Prime Minister Manuel Marrero singing "El Rey" (The King) with a gusto that verges on fanaticism. These are not historical characters, but rather hysterical ones.
Gone are the grandiose slogans of "The future belongs entirely to Socialism" and "We're happy here." Having structurally eroded, the structure has gradually given way, revealing its crudest strata, in a kind of intellectual autophagy that has gradually undermined one of its fundamental cornerstones: the aggressive manipulation of language to implant mental schemes. In any case, today the Cuban people are less inclined to blindly assimilate slogans. The times of "I say...I dictate" have been replaced by an era of "you say...I say."
It is a perennial controversy, which also has a multiplicity of means to be presented to the people. And you no longer have to be a scholar to quote Plato, since the Library of Alexandria now fits in a memory card. This, at the street level, means the possibility of questioning any assertion, no matter who it comes from; no one has the last word, not even Google. The political playing field has changed, infinitely widening to infinity, and the ability to formulate criteria is now measured by trending topics, not by the DOR (Department of Revolutionary Orientation), an actual incarnation of something akin to Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Sixty years later, the dark prophecy of 1984 has been averted by a tiny microchip. The same thing has happened with much of the political fabric woven by Castroism, which was designed for a world of megacommunications and cannot survive the realities of a global village characterized by microcommunications. Macropolitics, the domain of parties, is gradually being supplanted by micropolitics, that of the individual.
The people are the fiercest of politicians, because they do not need demagoguery to promote their agendas, as they stem from real and concrete needs. Their discourse is very clear, focused on the future and not on the past, like the system's. The people do not want a continuity of Patria o Muerte (Homeland or Death) but rather their own determination of Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life). And freedom, and prosperity. With their expressions, and also with their actions, they are giving the regime a lesson in semantics, as well as politics.