Madrid/In recent days, two Cuban political prisoners recently arrived in exile – José Daniel Ferrer, leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, and Luis Robles, sentenced to five years in prison for holding a banner with the word “freedom” – have been the target of attacks. The most disturbing thing is that a large part of these attacks come from sectors of the opposition itself.
It is paradoxical that activists who proclaim “freedom for all political prisoners” quickly join campaigns of insults, suspicions and conspiracy theories against those who paid for their dissidence with years in prison.
In the case of Ferrer, it was foreseeable that State Security would try to undermine his leadership and prevent him from articulating consensus in exile. With Robles, younger, they seek to demotivate him, damage his testimony and warn other Cubans that the community that today demands your freedom may tomorrow call you a “traitor” without paying attention to your sacrifices.
The regime survives, to a large extent, thanks to this mutual distrust. Paranoia demobilizes, discredits, isolates and causes both Cubans within the Island and international institutions to lose confidence in the opposition.
In totalitarian contexts, distrust reaches extreme levels, since the fear of infiltration by agents of the regime is real.
In my interrogations in Cuba, they almost never sought concrete information: they wanted to sow discord. They tried to antagonize me with activists like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Maykel OsorboTania Bruguera, Manuel Cuesta Morúa or Ferrer, and I know they did the same with everyone.
In totalitarian contexts, distrust reaches extreme levels, since the fear of infiltration by agents of the regime is real. Direct penetration by undercover agents is a consistent and early practice, perfected by agencies such as the Soviet KGB and the Stasi in the German Democratic Republic. Beyond simple surveillance, these agents actively intervened in the internal dynamics of opposition groups, fostering rivalries, sowing rumors and promoting tactics that compromised the organization in the face of repression.
It is true that in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the Cheka created false opposition organizations to attract, identify and neutralize true dissidents, as occurred in the famous Operation Trust. These strategies sought not only to infiltrate, but also to manufacture a controlled opposition. However, over time, counterintelligence evolved toward less daring methods. The greatest risk of fabricating a false opposition lies in the “effect boomerang”, losing control of the organization and its leaders.
One of the notorious examples of this effect is the terrorist Osama Bin Laden. During the 1980s, the CIA backed the Afghan mujahideen to weaken the USSR, creating an environment that allowed Bin Laden to establish himself and later found Al Qaeda. This temporary alliance was later transformed into a direct threat against the United States, demonstrating that strategies based on manipulation or instrumentalization can produce more dangerous enemies than the original objective.
State Security, a disciple of the KGB and the Stasi, does not usually take too many risks. Every time I read about the theory of “fraudulent change,” I wonder if we are aware of the shabby conservatism of the leadership in Cuba, the high age of its leaders, and the innate rejection they express of any change, even if it is “little change.” We forget that this regime has not even been capable of mutating towards the Chinese or Vietnamese models, that Díaz-Canel chose the word “continuity” as his motto, and that the “relay cadres” are particularly mediocre, lacking in originality and dogmatic.
Its undercover agents have been mostly “people in line”, whisperers, without much relevance or prominence.
I do not rule out that, in the future, they could plan something similar to the “fraud exchange.” But, until now, neither the official discourse nor international alliances point in that direction. The regime fears that, by moving a single millimeter from its positions, the entire building will fall suddenly. This is also why it takes decades to implement less daring economic reforms.
The Cuban counterintelligence apparatus has preferred more orthodox tactics. They have avoided the direct creation of groups or leaders, preferring to infiltrate, gather information, generate rumors, influence decisions and dynamite organizations to destroy them from within. Even the level of repression varies capriciously between one opposition figure and another to unleash theories and suspicions. Their undercover agents have been mostly “people in line”, whisperers, without much relevance or prominence, precisely to avoid the effect boomerang.
Although all democratic movements in totalitarian contexts suffered from the problem of division, there are some examples of organizations that were successful. The cases of Solidarity in Poland or Charter 77 and Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia demonstrated that alliances and consensus beyond political colors do manage to overcome the divisions manufactured by power.
It has transferred its strategy to social networks, creating not only defenders of the system, but also false “radicals”, from anonymous profiles.
These unifying agendas allowed ideological or social differences to remain in the background. The breadth of the coalition, added to a non-violent strategy and a large popular mobilization, largely neutralized the capacity of the security apparatus to exploit internal fractures. Unity, in these cases, was not the product of deep ideological affinities, but of a pragmatic negotiation around shared objectives.
The Cuban regime has studied these examples and acts to prevent us from putting them into practice. It has transferred its strategy to social networks, creating not only defenders of the system, but also false “radicals”, from anonymous profiles, whose mission is to attack other opponents, promote conspiracy theories and sabotage alliances.
After more than six decades of dictatorship, Cuban society faces enormous difficulty in practicing tolerance, respect for difference and consensus. And it does so in a world where extreme polarization threatens even consolidated democracies. It would be tragic if paranoia – that seed that the regime cultivates with precision – prevents us from achieving freedom before democracy, in other latitudes, begins to become extinct.
