Epitaph for a Party 
By Miriam Celaya
Translating Cuba - 14ymedio
April 23, 2016

I ask for a minute’s standing ovation, gentlemen: the Communist Party of Cuba has died. The internment, which will be known to future generations of Cubans as the 7th Congress of the PCC, held its memorial service Tuesday, 19 April 2016, exactly 55 years after the dazzling “first great defeat of Yankee imperialism in America.”

Due to those whimsical paradoxes of history, the “Socialist Revolution,” proclaimed in those days of pure popular enthusiasm, has finally succumbed, but not by any action of the imperialist enemy warrior, but by the arrogance of its own makers.

The death of the PCC, after a long and painful illness, was authenticated with the election of the “new” Central Committee, headed – but for unavoidable exceptions – by the same crested brains of the revolutionary gerontocracy, irresponsibly clinging to power counter to the country’s deterioration. The octogenarian party has not had the capability to renew itself to make way for a new generation of leaders trained to meet the challenges of these times.

Nevertheless, there were earlier signs of the inevitability of this death. In the last five years, the Cuban “political vanguard” allowed itself the luxury of wasting one more opportunity to reverse the state of national calamity , and elected instead the path to stagnation, if not retrogression. Cognition of its own frailty and the fear of losing control over society paralyzed the once powerful PCC, which ended up losing its last shreds of credibility among Cubans.

Some of these signs of weakness and decay are the lack of programs of reform that would allow for the beginning of a process of changes and overcoming the persistent poverty; the disconnect between the ruling elite and the social base; the inability to move beyond the experimental phase of the few and insufficient economic openings; the improvisation of insufficient and ineffective measures designed to alleviate the consequences of the crisis rather than eliminate its causes; and the constant and growing exodus that further impoverishes the nation. The capital of popular faith which rallied briefly at the beginning of the transfer of power from F. Castro to his brother (the “pragmatic reformist” Raúl) has died.

Over a year after being announced with much fanfare, and after a process of secret meetings where only a select group of anointed ones “discussed” the documents to be analyzed in its sessions, the conclave that supposedly would trace the fate of 11 million souls not only ignored the national drift, it squandered the additional time in an attempt to counteract the harmful effect that, according to the leaders of the geriatric caste, the imperialist enemy has injected into the soul of the nation.

Behold the political power that has consecrated Cuba’s destiny according to a new turning point.

In short, there will not be a Cuba before and after the 7th Congress of the PCC, but before and after the restoration of relations with the US, specifically, after the visit of the American president, Barack Obama, to the Cuban capital. This is the implicit recognition of the failure of the Castro-communist project.

Thus, the issues that would occupy de jure the discussions, namely, the conceptualization of this absurd unreality called “the Cuban socioeconomic and political model,” the problem of the dual currency, feeding of the population, constitutional reform, the highly vaunted foreign investment program and an endless list of other emergencies related to ordinary Cubans, are left hanging. The PCC has no answers to social demands.

Instead, the leaders have opted for entrenchment, and, as if current generations of Cubans believed in symbols of the past, the leadership decided to play as trump a devalued card: it dusted off and preened as much as possible the former President, former First Secretary of the Central Committee of the PCC and former Undisputed Commander in Chief, and placed him before the monastic convent’s plenary session – after also cloistering the doors to the tabernacle, safe from the inquiring inquisitorial foreign press – in an attempt to legitimize his new ideological war against the Empire.

With all certainty, a war with not enough followers, unless the new Cuban soldiers could be called that: the migrants who are invading the enemy by land, sea and air in robust legions to defeat the enemy by occupying his territory, triumphantly and permanently. Memories of the old ex-warrior’s battle and moral victories, whether real or imagined, have been left way behind in our national recollections.

Now it becomes clear that the PCC has died. The so-called 7th Congress was not that at all, but a swan song. Just the sad spectacle of a group of recalcitrant elders addicted to power and their cohort busybodies (buquenques, in good Cuban). If there is any honest communist left in Cuba – if in the imaginary case such ever existed – he must be plunged into the deepest mourning. Had our half a century of history been different, the late Party might deserve a minute of silence. But we don’t need to be hypocrites, at any rate; we Cubans have been silent for way too long.

Translated by Norma Whiting

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