Madrid/In 2016, in the middle of the International Book Fair of Havana, the state editorial art and literature put on the table 1984by George Orwell. The gesture was wrapped in a prologue by the official historian Pedro Pablo Rodríguez who worked as a road map to “read correctly” the British writer in Cuba. There the publication was defined as a “surely controversial editorial company” aimed at “activating an intellectual debate”. However, they have never dared to publish Rebellion on the farm.
The novel 1984 He could circulate timidly on the island because the regime believed that it had managed to “tame it” through official prologues and readings that presented it as a generic warning about surveillance and totalitarianism in abstract, but without alluding directly to the Cuban system. Granma He repeated the prologue lines, but took care not to establish parallels with the domestic power structure. The book was announced, sold and commented, but with interpretive railings.
‘Rebellion in the farm’ shoots too directly towards the belly of a revolution that promised equality and ended up establishing a privileged caste
Instead, Rebellion on the farm Shoot too directly towards the belly of a revolution that promised equality and ended up establishing a privileged caste. The resemblance to the bureaucracy and the Olive Green Generalate is so obvious that the “daring” of Cuban publishers arrives.
In this satirical novel there are no neutralizing prologues. The pigs that change the rules and become new masters are impossible to reinterpret without seeing parallelism with Fidel and Raúl Castro, Miguel Díaz-Canel or Manuel Marrero Cruz. That is why the State dares to manage the reading of 1984but fear losing control with Rebellion on the farmwhose naked symbolism the logic of Cuban power without margin for ideological makeup.
On August 17, 1945, in a London exhausted by the war, the Secker & Warburg publisher published that brief and fierce fable: Animal Farm. Orwell had achieved, after several rejections, to put into circulation a satire that undressed the corruption of power born of the Russian revolution and the posterior era stalinist in the Soviet Union. Eight decades later, Rebellion on the farm It remains an uncomfortable mirror for any regime that proclaims itself redeemer while reinforcing its own privilege.
In universities, the most curious students had to make sure to hide them very well under the mattress
Although on the island the name of Orwell never disappeared from the conversation – almost always in a half voice – the circulation of his books was for clandestine decades. His works circulated by hand, in photocopies and memories flashwhile the editorial state ignored them or called them “enemy propaganda.” In customs, it was common for the copies to cosfiscate as if they were dangerous objects. In universities, the most curious students had to make sure to hide them very well under the mattress.
The Cuban bibliography 1959–1962 from the José Martí National Library – compilation of the “most fundamental” published in the first years of Castroism – did not review 1984 neither Rebellion on the farm Although a private publishing house, United Libraries, published them between 1960 and 1961, before the government declared socialist. The omission documents the ideological filtering of the printed memory from the same origin of the revolution.
Since the end of the nineties there are parts of book seizures considered “counterrevolutionary”, while official spokesmen assured, in the face of cultural tourism, that “in Cuba there are no prohibited books.” The contradiction between speech and practice – a classic Creole Orwellism – is registered in hundreds of testimonies.
‘The Sixth’ went to prison for trying to release two green painted pigs with the names Fidel and Raúl, explicitly inspired by the novel
The case of artist Danilo The sixth Maldonado condensed the explosive value of Rebellion on the farm In the middle of the street. In December 2014, before releasing two pigs painted green in Havana with the names Fidel and Raúl, explicitly inspired by the novel, He was arrested And months went by prison without trial, under accusations of “contempt” and “offense to leaders.” Performance never happened; Preventive censorship imposed on the work.
Cuban censorship, although fierce and constant, never reached the technological and algorithmic sophistication that Orwell imagined in 1984 nor the one that China deploys today with its digital surveillance system. On the island there is no Big Brother with cameras in each corner or an army of algorithms monitoring each click on the network. What predominates is the repression of old usage, the physical surveillance of state safety, the rustic cyberclaria battalion and the blocking of web pages using rudimentary filters.
The Cuban state controls, but does so with tools closer to the electric blackout and the police threat than to the perfected digital panoptic. Its repressive arsenal is effective, but primitive compared to the Chinese model, which almost literally embodies the Orwellian machinery of 1984.
Cuba looks more like the farm described by Orwell than to the overwhelmed of ‘1984’ ‘
Instead, Rebellion on the farm It fits crudely to Cuban reality. There are no futuristic technologies or omnipresent surveillance systems, but a peasant story, of stables and commandments painted in a wall that rewrite at the craving of the leaders.
Cuba, with its material precariousness and its insistence on the collective sacrifice in the name of a betrayed revolution, looks more like the farm described by Orwell than to the oceanania. The pigs that appropriate the revolution and end up drinking whiskey, fattening and sleeping in beds are metaphors that fit perfectly with a Cuban elite that, after decades of predicted austerity, lives in exclusive neighborhoods, with privileges forbidden to the rest of the population.
Birán, where Fidel Castro was born, with irony evokes the stage of the novel
It is no accident that the farm of Birán, where Fidel Castro was born, evoked with irony the stage of the novel. A rural environment turned into a founding myth of the Revolution: the personal estate of the Castro. Cuban totalitarianism does not occur with control screens or with a refined neo -government, but with the rusticity of a peasant model that, however, managed to submit a whole nation.
Rebellion on the farm It shows the agrarian past turned into endless present. And it is that roughness, that brutal domain exercise in the name of equality, which makes the Orwellian fable a much more precise radiography of Castroism than the technological dystopia of the Big Brother.
