Armando Hart was one of the main exponents in Cuba of a dogmatic, archaic and outdated political elite.
LIMA, Peru – Official Cuba, immersed in celebrating the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro and the half century since the beginning of the Cuban military intervention in Angola, has also dedicated time to paying tribute to Armando Hart Dávalos on the occasion of the 95th anniversary of his birth, on June 13, 1930.
And it’s no wonder. Hart was one of the main intellectuals organic elements of Castroism at the service of which he was totally and unconditionally from his youth, when he became the national coordinator of the July 26 Movement, and until his death, at the age of 87, which occurred on November 26, 2017, exactly one year after the death of his idolized boss Fidel Castro.
In 1959, despite having no teaching experience, Hart was appointed by Fidel Castro as Minister of Education. During his six years in office, until 1965, he destroyed the until then advanced and effective Cuban education system, abolishing subjects such as Morals and Civics, ideologizing it and prioritizing the indoctrination of children and adolescents.
He always enjoyed the trust by Fidel Castrowho ignored the old communists of the PSP who accused Hart of not being a communist, but “a petty bourgeois reformist”, or those who simply – as they say, even his wife and mother of his children, Haydée Santamaría – detested him for being pedantic and unfriendly.
In 1976, when he was appointed to head the Ministry of Culture that replaced the National Council of Culture, Hart had the difficult task of doing damage control of the so-called Gray Five Years. And although the repression against artists and intellectuals was softened, the truth is that Hart never abandoned his hard line.
Since Hart ceased to be Minister of Culture in 1997, he was replaced by Abel Prietowent on to preside over the José Martí Cultural Society. In his speeches and in the dozen books he wrote, which were pure teque with intellectual pretensions, Hart dedicated himself to manipulating Martí’s ideology to try to give a theoretical foundation to Castroism.
In October 2007, when thousands of Cubans were speaking out for reforms in the assemblies called by Raúl Castro, Armando Hart, a dogmatist and staunch supporter of immobility, wrote an article that was published in the newspaper Juventud Rebelde where he warned that the call for debate was only “applicable in the long term and within certain channels.”
As Hart explained in that article, the objectives of the debate should be limited to “strengthening the economy, perfecting defensive capacity and achieving ideological invulnerability.” Faithful to the school mentality for party cadres, he advised that the priority be to “strengthen the educational-ideological work of the Communist Party on the masses.”
That article by Hart, because it was retrograde and stagnant, caused a storm of e-mails that almost reached the magnitude of the one caused shortly before by the appearance on TV of Pavón and Serguera, the executors of the Gray Five Year Period.
The majority of Internet users, who claimed to be “revolutionaries” but just in case, used pseudonyms without surnames to insist on the need for changes, criticized Hart in harsh terms. “A good example of the fossilized and dogmatic class that orders food by phone and has never ridden a camel!” wrote one who identified himself as Floreal.
But that storm of e-mails dissipated, without its echoes ever reaching the official press, as Hart’s article had. The red light bulbs that had lit up with the debate assemblies – many correctly called them, lamentation assemblies – went out one by one, amid Raúl Castro’s promises to go “without haste and without pause,” which was still faster than Hart and other supporters of the jicotea pace wanted.
Armando Hart was one of the main exponents of a dogmatic, archaic and outdated political elite. Those that still survive, no matter how stubborn they may be, can no longer remedy or delay their condemnation to extinction, as happened to the dinosaurs in the glacial period.
