This is the Cuba that Raúl Castro wants to create. In a marked shift from the Marxist totalitarianism that his brother imposed on the island, Raúl Castro has said what every competent human being knows:

“Equality is not the same as egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is in itself a form of exploitation; exploitation of the good workers by those who are less productive and lazy.”

Unbelievable that a communist would finally admit this after 50 years of failed revolution that has only brought misery to Cuba. Castro has been pushing for wage reforms that tie wages to productivity and decentralizing agriculture a bit. What he has not changed and does not seem to want to change is state control of the economy or the population. Some people believe that Raúl differs from Fidel in that he wants to create a system similar to China’s; these steps seem to be a step towards that goal.

Here, though, is where what some consider “modernization” is simply dictatorship by other means. What Castro is modernizing is the communist dictatorship, from a Stalinist model to a Chinese model, without making any changes to the repressive machinery that continues to deny basic human rights to the Cuban people. The Chinese model of dictatorship (or one-party rule) is not communism-lite as many people have suggested for years, just ask the victims of government repression in Tibet or the unknown number of political prisoners still languishing in Chinese prisons.

For those who have read George Orwell’s “1984,” China is looking more and more like the dystopia that he vividly describes. It is a government that does not stop at political control but uses all of the technology at its disposal to control the information that exists out in the world. Information is the single most important weapon that a society has against tyranny and strict censorship is an attribute that almost all existing dictatorships share. This is the beginning of total Thought-Control, something that this humanity has not truly witnessed simply because the technology to facilitate it has never existed before. Cuba, for example, uses “actos de repudio” or “acts of repudiation” to intimidate activists through mob violence in addition to overt police control. Thought-Control is the next level of totalitarianism… and it is the path of Chinese Communism.

So while communist regimes around the world are starting to “modernize,” what they are actually doing is coming to understand that they no longer need fully centralized economic planning in order to control a population. They have learned that to control the human mind is the ultimate power, so when anyone comes to believe that Cuba embracing an economic system less directly controlled by the government is a good thing, I advise that they pick up a copy of “1984.”

In the novel, the existence of “Big Brother” was more a construct of the ruling Party than reality… In Cuba, we have not seen Fidel Castro in public since July 2006, the only thing that anyone has seen or heard is still photos, articles in the newspapers that bear his name, and rumors that he has been seen on walks… when a government can control what we know reality to be, they can make us believe anything.

-AG