Cuba and the Tyranny of Groupthink
DEVELOPMENTS
A Freedom House assessment of “Freedom on the Net” reports that Cuba remains one of
the world’s most repressive environments for the internet and information and
communication technologies (ICTs). Rather than provide unfettered access to the web,
the Cuban government has created a dual system with a national intranet and the global
internet. Most Cubans have access only to the national intranet, which consists of an
in-country e-mail system, a Cuban encyclopedia, websites that are supportive of the
government, and the like.
Cuba’s only two internet service providers are owned by the state, and surveillance is
extensive. It is estimated that less than two percent of the population (mostly government
officials and foreign companies) has access to the internet. Whatever connectivity is
available costs around $12.00 per hour in a country where the average monthly salary is
less than $20.00 per month.
Additionally, Cuba is also one of the few countries to have issued laws and regulations
explicitly outlawing certain online activities. Decree-Law 209, states, among other
restrictions, that “e-mail messages must not jeopardize national security.” Resolution
127 – on network security – bans the spreading of information that is against the social
interest, the integrity of the people, or national security. Resolution 56/1999 provides
that all material intended for publication on the internet must first be approved by the
National Registry of Serial Publications. And Resolution 92/2003 prohibits ICT service
providers from granting acess to individuals who are not approved by the government
and requires the providers to enable only domestic chat services, not international ones.
BACKGROUND
Underscoring the country’s self-imposed intellectual isolation, Boris Moreno, Cuba’s
Deputy Minister for Information Science and Communication, noted that “Cuba is
not concerned with the individual connection of its citizens to the internet. We use the
internet to defend the Revolution…”
The extent of Cuba’s political cyber police efforts and its concern with controls over
information was vividly captured in a recently leaked 54-minute video of a conference
identified as “Enemy Campaigns and the Politics of Confrontation with Counter
Revolutionary Groups.” The video shows a June 2010 lecture delivered behind-closed-
doors to an audience of mostly-uniformed officers of the Interior Ministry, — in charge of
Cuba’s domestic security The presentation investigated the presumed danger thatinternet
access poses to the government.
The lecturer, counter-intelligence cybernetic specialist officer Eduardo Fontes Suárez,
defines the internet as a field of battle that the government must use to its advantage.
He boasts of a new special section created within the Interior Ministry to work against
bloggers. He warns of the dangers of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter,
labeling them “classic combat networks” and citing as examples how Iran’s Green
Revolution and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution were “created” when social networks were
used to call people to street protests.
He highlights, in military jargon, the risks to the Cuban government posed by bloggers
like Yoani Sanchez and youth groups like Raices de Esperanza (Roots of Hope), a U.S.
group of university students that seeks to establish youth-to-youth contacts with its peers
in Cuba. We can only wonder what the Cuban leadership must be thinking following
events in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere across the Middle East.
The Cuban government has been remarkably successful in sealing the consciousness of
the Cuban people from the outside world, utilizing a doctrine of intellectual isolationism
in support of a self-sufficient and all-encompassing revolutionary dogma of intellectual
autarky. Fidel Castro made this intellectual self-sufficiency policy explicitly clear in his
1961 speech “Words to the Intellectuals”, in which he famously warned that: “within the
Revolution everything, against the Revolution, nothing.”
But this pursuit of intellectual autarky has also produced a classic case of what social
psychologist Irving Janis called “groupthink,” a condition that will ultimately prove to
be the regime’s undoing. Groupthink is a type of thought characteristic of cohesive in-
groups, whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically
testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. Decision-makers affected by groupthink ignore
alternatives and tend to follow irrational programs of action.
A case in point is General Castro’s new economic program formulated, in his words, “to
save Cuba from the economic abyss.” It is outlined in a 32- page document, and
comprises the economic platform for the VI Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba,
now scheduled for April 2011, to ratify the General’s economic directives.
A centerpiece of General Castro’s program is the firing of up to 1,300,000 government
workers – something in the order of 20 percent of the workforce- and allowing them
to make a living by becoming self-employed “outside the government sector.” In the
Cuban version of Orwellian doublespeak, the measures are labeled as an “actualization of
socialism” and ‘outside the government sector’ stands for the unspeakable private sector.
(Of course,
the dismissal measure assumes that everyone is temperamentally suited to be an
entrepreneur, is able to make a living in fields that may be far from their work experience
and professional training, and is able to do so without access to cash, credit, raw
materials, equipment, technology or any of the inputs necessary to produce goods and
services.)
Groupthink is also evident in how those selected for dismissal will be chosen. According
to the plan, a commission of experts will decide the optimal number of personnel
required for each state entity, while specially-trained workers’ commissions will decide
the positions to be eliminated. It is unclear what role seniority, patronage, friendship,
ideology, or socialist merit will play in the decision-making.
ANALYSIS
Perhaps most illustrative of the Cuban government’s groupthink (and as Dave
Barry might say, I am not making this up) is the specificity with which the Cuban
economic “reformers” have decided to allow those being fired to solicit permits, in order
to become self-employed in precisely 178 activities. These include:
Trade number 23-the purchases and sale of used books; 29-attendants of public
bathrooms (presumably for tips); 34-pruning of palm trees (apparently other trees will
still be pruned by the state); 49-wrapping buttons with fabric; 61-shoe shinning; 62-
cleaning of spark plugs; 69-typists; 110-box spring repairs (not to be confused with
number 116); 116-mattress repairs; 124-umbrella repairs; 125-refilling of disposable
cigarette lighters; 150-tarot cards fortune telling; 156-dandy (technical definition
unknown, male escort?); 158-natural fruits peeling (separate from 142-selling fruits in
kiosks).
In his economic dreamland of surrealist juxtapositions and non sequitur, General Castro
and his team believe that this bizarre list of self-employment possibilities is the way to
save the communist system. This disconnect flows from Cuba’s intellectual inbreeding
and isolationism, in which Cubans are unable to receive information freely and exchange
ideas openly.
Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Ceausescu’s Romania, Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and North Korea with its official state ideology
of Juche (self-sufficiency) are all examples of tyrannical groupthink regimes that pursued
policies of economic and intellectual autarky with disastrous results for its peoples and
often its leaders.
In Cuba, long-held Marxists-Leninist assumptions will not be swapped for another set
of beliefs without a democratically-inspired leadership. A genuine transition requires a
leadership moved and sustained by the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, petition, and
religion, defeating the tyranny of groupthink.
—
Dr. José Azel is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies,
University of Miami and the author of the recently published book, Mañana in Cuba.
