HAVANA TIMES – Faced with an increasingly tangled and contradictory Cuban reality, it is surprising to see how intelligent people resort to convoluted arguments to (in my humble opinion) justify the unjustifiable.
The ultimate expression of this tactic is the attempt to establish the legitimacy of Cuba’s current internal situation through the exact sciences.
I recently read two examples of such efforts, invoking Physics, Cybernetics, and Semiotics (I hope I’m not mistaken about the latter two) to discuss Fidel Castro Ruz’s continued relevance in today’s Cuba.
Energy and the Machine
Fidel Castro Smirnov, grandson of the Commander-in-Chief, published a text last August, on the occasion of his grandfather’s centennial, arguing that his grandfather remains present in Cuba because his energetic imprint is still active, by virtue of some obscure derivations of natural laws supposedly discovered by modern Physics.
Castro Smirnov is the son of Fidelito (Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart), the eldest son of the Maximum Leader, born before 1959, who studied Nuclear Physics in the USSR and later headed Cuba’s nuclear energy program. Fidelito married a Soviet colleague (hence his son’s Russian second surname) and committed suicide several years ago, joining the long list of famous Cubans who have taken their own lives. It is said that his death was the result of severe depression. Many people were fond of him…
Castro Smirnov’s controversial “physics-based” argument triggered an avalanche of reactions from internet users who expressed their astonishment on social media at the use of a “scientific” argument by someone presumably “materialist” in his philosophical outlook.
In 2025, the young Cuban essayist Iramis Rosique, involved in a form of activism we might call “left-wing Fidelism,” a molecular biologist and specialist in International Relations, published a book (which won an important literary competition) titled The Contemporary Relevance of the Revolution. In it, he argues for the existence of a “leader-machine that produces meaning” in today’s Cuba, nothing less than a “Fidel… who continues to act invisibly in our reality,” since the Chief became a “walking symbolic body” back when he delivered speeches lasting up to 14 hours in the Plaza of the Revolution before what was then an enthusiastic crowd, and has remained alive in that form to this day.
Jose Lezama Lima, the great Cuban writer associated with neo-Baroque symbolism, famous among other things for publishing poems, essays, and novels considered unintelligible and impenetrable by much of the reading public, pales in comparison with such a proposition.
Aside from zombie movies, I was reminded of how, in Russia, the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party (which is neither liberal nor democratic), after its strongman—the outrageous Vladimir Zhirinovsky—died from complications after overdoing it with Covid vaccines, fed his speeches and publications into an artificial intelligence (AI) system. The purpose was to train the AI on all that material so it could answer any question as though it were Zhirinovsky himself.
This way of keeping someone’s “consciousness” alive in a machine is called a thanabot (from Thanatos—death in Greek—and [ro]bot).
If a “Zhirinovsky-machine” is possible, why not a “Fidel-machine”?
The Physics of Triumphant Misery in Cuba
Before appealing to the Physics of subtle energies and “walking symbolic bodies” to justify the current Cuban State, it would be advisable to examine the actual physical condition of Cuba and its people—those of us who get around on foot and live with almost no sources of energy, whether electrical or nutritional.
Havana’s Malecón looks like a city at war because of the destruction of its buildings. In Old Havana, walking is dangerous because a piece of tangible historical heritage could split your skull open, falling with an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared from a 1930 Art Deco house or an 18th-century Baroque building. And that’s not even mentioning the physical infrastructure of power plants and electrical transmission systems, whose collapses now occur almost as frequently as beef used to arrive at butcher shops through the ration book in the 1980s (every nine days).
That’s the physics we live with.
Cuba has incorporated the term “miraculous structural stability” into the specialized language of Civil Engineering, referring to a building that—according to blueprints and equations—should collapse but, for some mysterious reason, remains standing. That’s the reality of Cuba today.
Rosique attempts to argue in his book that “the Revolution” remains relevant because of its achievements. But the collapse is not merely structural; it is also human. There is almost no quality school education left in Cuba, no healthcare for all, no general access to basic foodstuffs or medicines, no decent wages or pensions within reach of the majority. Not even the interest in cultural self-improvement that we knew in relatively recent decades has survived the shock of the collapse. There are municipalities without courts because the judges have emigrated.
A shock that began long before Trump’s recent measures, which have nevertheless, obviously, made it worse.
Cybernetics Without Feedback?
As for a supposed leadership that “provides answers” (or, better yet, solutions) to “the population” (“the masses,” “the people,” “ordinary folks”…), the collapse is also complete.
Cuba’s once much-touted “participatory democracy,” based on periodic meetings between delegates to the Municipal Assemblies of People’s Power and the communities that elected them, where delegates were supposed to answer questions and solve problems, simply no longer exists.
Without getting into whether Cuba’s political and electoral system is better or worse than those of other countries, the reality is that these meetings are simply no longer convened.
Cuban politics today is also a case of “miraculous structural stability.” It is based on cybernetics without feedback; that is, it provides no legitimate and effective ways for those “at the top” to learn what is happening “down below.”
Talking about walking symbolic bodies and subtle energies in the face of this crisis of legitimacy, confronted with reality and “the way things are,” is simply ideological escapism.
Cuba’s attempt to build a Social State has failed.
Nobody knows what will come next, or how.