The Cuban exile institution, to which I technically belong, prefers Javier Milei. They are also pro-Zionists, lovers of Bolsonaro and Trump, and when some posh man from Ferraz says that Pedro Sánchez is a dictator, they agree with him, that yes, he is, giving away their own experience and trivializing what it means to live in a dictatorship. The complicity of the Latin American left with Castroism and, therefore, a return of a steely feeling of revenge, cannot be the only reason that explains the permanently reactionary projection of this community.
There is something even more intricate and dangerous, the desperation to belong to the territory of the present, the unconfessed desire that their misfortunes not be limited to the country from which they escaped. They need politics—its methods, its words—to still resemble the ways they know, the violence of their customs.
Like every victim of totalitarianism also incubates the totalitarian virus, this exile itself, as well as its Venezuelan and Nicaraguan counterparts, distributes proclamations of the apocalypse wherever it lands, they are doomsayers of the end of the world who constantly fail in their predictions because they do not know the winning rider, who He is the rider of capital. That beast that defeated them is already a dead beast, which only lives through its memories, but no one wants to give up its exceptionality.
They predicted that López Obrador would remain in power. He’s not going to pass. They predicted that Petro would remain in power. He’s not going to pass. They predicted that Boric would remain in power. He’s not going to pass. They did not predict that Bukele would do it. They had no chance of predicting it, given the strangeness, the monsters and the underlying confusion that liberal agony generates, but now that Bukele has done it, they approve of it. Finally someone speaks his language again.
Among so many things, what truly seduces them about Milei is her delirium, a grotesquerie that seems to pursue a certain illusory world and attacks a concrete and fundamental one. He goes against the State because it is communism, he understands public education as a doctrine, all property that is not private is idle and he translates the market as the natural law of free men. This phantasmagoria, which covers almost any current form of government with Stalinism, returns something of the lost materiality to the Cuban exile, a more pronounced texture to its tragedy, which is the first form of its identity, and, mainly, a turn of the historical hand and the direction of individual esteem. Our lag would become the vanguard. We would no longer be late towards democracy, but rather we would have arrived first at authoritarianism.
The specific constitution of that sublimated desire is what explains the conservative political nature of the exoduses from the Caribbean-Soviet bloc, and is what has led me to understand that I not only had to exile myself from Cuba. He also had to do so about his exile, because it is a totalitarian exile.
I am not speaking, of course, of a form of government, but of a metaphysical order. “All the forces of being are organized little by little into twin structures that are increasingly more confrontational with each other. Thus, all human forces are entrenched in a struggle that is as implacable as it is sterile, since they do not put into play any concrete difference, any positive value,” says René Girard, and then he concludes: “Totalitarianism exists when it arrives, from desire to desire. desire, to the general and permanent mobilization of the being at the service of nothingness.”
The spokespersons, in European and American human rights forums, for the terrible Cuban situation – where more than a thousand political prisoners adorn the island’s prisons, a recent escape of more than 400,000 migrants clogged the Central American routes and the waters of the Strait of Florida, and those who live poorly in the country face a devastating economic reality—are at the same time incapable of escaping the ideological place in which those same spaces of denunciation place them. They end up silencing, if not directly celebrating, magical thinking, neo-fascist rises to power, or buying as legitimate the fetishized democracy of regional oligarchies.
Such activists spend their lives asking for solidarity for their country, but they are incapable of offering it and, certainly, they are not going to receive it either, because they make exclusive use of tragedy. It is a closed game where each one uses another’s cause for internal political efforts. They are part of an empty theater, which disperses and focuses any social dissatisfaction, to weaken and domesticate it in a speculative traffic in national misfortunes. The neoliberal corporation acts as an extended agent, with no resistance whatsoever, while deactivating the most formidable gain of globalization: the wonderful inevitability of the other. In that sense, the company does not have a more efficient ally than the proliferation of illiberal projects.
Today, borders do not delimit the circulation of anything, neither bodies nor merchandise, they barely serve to subjectify local authoritarianisms, that is, the indigenous disguise through which the violence of capital is distributed. These antidemocratic experiments understand that the West needs to condemn them in the visible order, a kind of political procedure, while the economic muscle configures internal alliances. The exiled dissidents are then, unfortunately, figures of smoke in a world of distraction, blurting out the script of exceptionalism.
That same metaphysical trap, the belief in singularity, is what means that the most faithful replicas of Trump in the south have appeared precisely in Brazil and Argentina, a sample of the eccentric dream of distinction, the mimicry of extensive territories. But Brazil and Argentina, if they want to save themselves, will have no choice but to embrace Glissant’s idea: “I believe in the future of small countries.”
Would there be something then in the condition of the exile that would allow him to place himself on the platform of the present from a different place? Would there be gain in loss? It is about the inevitable renunciation of national confinement, but not to obtain a certain abstract universality, which does nothing more than romanticize exile, but to acquire the consciousness of a broader culture and history that should function as an integrating continuum. From a place like this, the exile would no longer be behind or ahead of the world to which he is going to belong, he would not be a noble savage nor a prophet of the West, and he would have rejected the misleading evaluations that reward his so-called particularity. .
This general structure has a firm representation at every possible scale. We are talking about a scenario where triumphs, whether in the political, economic or cultural order, are directed towards those who best excavate the backyard of their identities in search of an exclusive mineral increasingly deformed by the advertising mirror. There is a gold rush of the subaltern self, isolated in prototypes that are then sold as exotic junk in the sinks of colonial guilt.
Paved are the routes of constant pilgrimages to the academic bazaars of the north where people offer the skin of their family, rent the mark of their lineage or their bastardy, and the competition of the trade of ideas requires them to specialize in them more and more. Let them be more Indian, let them be more black, let them be more and more condemned, but so that everything remains whiter. However, if the exile understands the trick, he would become a subject aware of his modern condition, someone who does not feed, in any of its variants, the balkanization of pain or the Latin American party.
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