The Cuban exile institution, of which I am technically a part, favors Javier Milei. They are also pro-Zionists, lovers of Bolsonaro and Trump, and when a nobleman from Ferraz says that Pedro Sánchez is a dictator, they agree that he is, giving away their own experience and trivializing what that is means live in a dictatorship. The complicity of the Latin American left with Castroism and the concomitant return of an iron sense of revenge cannot be the only reason that explains the permanent reactionary projection of this community.
There is something even more complicated and dangerous: the desperation to belong to the territory of the present, the unacknowledged desire that their misfortune not be confined to the country from which they fled. They need politics – their methods, their words – to still resemble the habits they know, the violence of their customs.
Just as every victim of totalitarianism also gives birth to the totalitarian virus, this exile itself, as well as its Venezuelan and Nicaraguan counterparts, spread proclamations of the apocalypse wherever they land, they are doomsday prophets of the end of the world, constantly failing in their predictions because they know the victorious rider not who He is the rider of capital. The beast that defeated them is already a dead beast, living only through his memories, but no one wants to give up his exceptionality.
They predicted that López Obrador would remain in power. That will not happen. They predicted that Petro would remain in power. That will not happen. They predicted that Boric would remain in power. That will not happen. They didn’t predict Bukele would do it. They had no chance of predicting it, given the strangeness, the monsters, and the underlying confusion that liberal agony creates, but now that Bukele has done it, they’re OK with it. Finally someone speaks his language again.
One of the things that really seduces her about Milei is her delirium, a grotesqueness that seems to be chasing a certain illusory world and attacking a concrete and fundamental world. It is directed against the state because it is communism, it sees public education as a doctrine, all property that is not private is idle and it translates the market as the natural law of free people. This phantasmagoria, which covers almost every current form of government with Stalinism, gives back to the Cuban exile something of the lost materiality, a more pronounced texture of its tragedy, which represents the first form of its identity and, above all, a turn of the Cuban exile’s historical hand and direction of individual appreciation. Our latecomer would become the vanguard. We would no longer have come too late to democracy, but would have arrived at authoritarianism first.
The specific nature of this sublimated desire explains the conservative political nature of emigration from the Caribbean-Soviet bloc and made me realize that I had to banish more than just myself from Cuba. He also had to do this with regard to his exile, because it is a totalitarian exile.
Of course I’m not talking about a form of government, but rather about a metaphysical order. “All the forces of being are gradually organizing themselves into twin structures that are increasingly confrontational with one another. “So all human forces are entangled in a struggle that is as relentless as it is fruitless, since they bring no concrete difference, no positive value into play,” says René Girard and then concludes: “Totalitarianism exists when it comes from desire.” , desire, desire, for the general and permanent mobilization of the being in the service of nothingness.”
Speakers in European and American human rights forums about the terrible situation in Cuba – 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 Florida Strait, and those who living in poverty in the country, face a devastating economic reality – and at the same time are unable to escape the ideological place in which the same spaces of denunciation place them. They end up silencing, if not outright celebrating, magical thinking and neo-fascist power grabs, or buying into the fetishized democracy of regional oligarchies as legitimate.
Such activists spend their lives asking for solidarity for their country, but they are unable to offer it, and they certainly will not accept it, because they only resort to tragedy. It is a closed game in which everyone uses each other’s concerns for internal political efforts. They are part of an empty theater that disperses and concentrates every social discontent in order to weaken and domesticate it in a speculative traffic in national misfortunes. The neoliberal corporation acts as an extended agent, without any resistance, while simultaneously deactivating globalization’s most powerful gain: the wonderful inevitability of the Other. In this sense, the company has no more efficient ally than the spread of illiberal projects.
Today, borders do not limit the circulation of anything, neither bodies nor goods, they hardly serve to subjectivize local authoritarianisms, that is, the indigenous obfuscation through which the violence of capital is distributed. These anti-democratic experiments understand that the West must condemn them in the visible order, a kind of political process, while economic power forms internal alliances. Unfortunately, the dissidents living in exile are then just smoke figures in a world of distraction from which the script of exceptionalism bursts out.
It is the same metaphysical trap, the belief in the singularity, that leads to the fact that the most faithful replicas of Trump in the South have appeared precisely in Brazil and Argentina, an example of the eccentric dream of distinction, of imitation of vast 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 then be something in the situation of exile that would allow him to place himself on the platform of the present from another place? Would there be a gain in a loss? It is about the inevitable renunciation of national limitation, but not about the achievement of a certain abstract universality, which means nothing more than romanticizing exile, but about the achievement of the consciousness of a culture and a broader history that function as an integrating continuum should. From such a place, the exile would be neither behind nor above the world to which he will belong, he would be neither a noble savage nor a prophet of the West, and he would have rejected the misleading assessments that reward his so-called specialness.
This general structure has a fixed representation at every possible scale. We are talking about a scenario in which triumphs, be they political, economic or cultural, go to those who best dig out the backyard of their identity in search of an exclusive mineral that is 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 pits of colonial guilt.
Paved are the paths of constant pilgrimages to the academic bazaars of the North, where people offer the skin of their family, tear the mark of their descent or their bastard, and the competition of trade in ideas requires them to specialize in them more and more. Let them be more Indian, let them become 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 situation, someone who feeds neither the balkanization of pain nor the Latin American party in any of its variants.
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