In Cuba, equality didn’t just sweep away the privileges of money; it also erased the nuances of human interaction.

By Jose A. Adrian Torres (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – For years, the Cuban Revolution has provided an inexhaustible source of paradoxes. Some are comically endearing. Others, unsettling. And a few, simply absurd. Among the latter, there’s one that intrigued me since my first visits in the 1990s: that peculiar form of “equality” that wasn’t based on mutual respect but on the symbolic erasure of all differences. An equality that didn’t seek justice but uniformity. An equality that didn’t elevate anyone but managed to bring everyone down.

On one of my trips to Havana, a scientist friend—well-trained academically, brilliant, clearheaded, but with a sharp sense of humor about social realities—told me a story that was almost folkloric, though tinged with tragedy. He worked at a “priority” research center—one of the few places where science was still carried out under reasonably decent, though precarious, conditions.

One ordinary morning, as he walked across a freshly mopped hallway, he heard a cleaning woman behind him shout:

“Hey, hey, compañero! Where do you think you’re going? Not this way! Use the side! Don’t dirty the floor!”

The tone was more reproachful than polite. And the word compañero—supposed to convey camaraderie—here served as a formula for forced leveling. It didn’t matter if you published in indexed journals or carried a bucket of bleach; here, everyone was the same. Or rather, no one could feel above anyone else, even if their role was different, their effort greater, or their responsibility weightier.

This is perhaps one of the great misunderstandings of egalitarian socialism: confusing equality with indistinction, and respect with identical treatment.

The revolutionary compañero, so omnipresent in official Cuban language, ended up hollowed out, used to flatten everything. It replaced “sir,” “doctor,” “engineer,” “licenciado”—even simple “usted”—with the intention of erasing inherited social hierarchies. But what it achieved was more unsettling: it erased distinctions where they should exist, without........

© Havana Times