The Department of Psychological Warfare

Port of Mariel, Cuba

Photo by Pavel Mata on Unsplash

In a collection of oral histories on the Cuban exodus to the United States in the 1980s known as the Mariel Boatlift, called Voices of Mariel, the exiles who described their experiences leaving Cuba described some common themes.

One was the “acts of repudiation” in which schoolchildren would take a field trip to throw rocks and eggs at the houses of those who betrayed the revolution, calling them pigs, worms, and scum. These were the neighbors they had grown up with, and they were told by the authorities to bully and alienate them. When friends were marked as enemies, the cowardly slunk away or hid in the crowd, hoping not to be recognized.

These themes are common to almost every country which adopted a communist system. There is an old man who I have come to know by hearsay, Lao Zhang, a man with an incredible story of the Cultural Revolution.

Lao Zhang was born into a farming family in Guangdong, and he was raised there as a simple farmer. However, when he was still a teenager, he experienced the famine that occurred as a result of governmental mismanagement. As a peasant, he was treated as the property of the state and had to keep working even though he was denied eating. He said they first went down to two meals a day, then just a single meal, and he couldn’t keep up the energy. He decided, like many others, to swim for Hong Kong. He held onto a piece of Styrofoam and swam for three or four hours until he reached the island. Once in Hong Kong, he tried to work at the port as a laborer carrying goods, but he was rarely hired since he was so scrawny. He moved into an apartment in the infamous Kowloon Walled City. He could barely get by, so he got on a boat and went to the US, where he began working at restaurant kitchens. At some point, he wanted to look for greener pastures, so he went to Hamburg in Germany and worked in kitchens there for fifteen years. Then he came back to the US. He already had some relatives over there, and he worked in their restaurant. He married a woman from Hong Kong. At some point, he got his formal paperwork. He never learned English nor German. He bought a small house in the US sometime in the 1990s. Well into his seventies, he continues to work a demanding, laborious job six days a week. He’s a simple and pure minded person, honest, he doesn’t swear, and he doesn’t speak of women lewdly. In every way, he is the salt of the earth. His cause should be the one that the Communist government champions, and they should be doing everything in their power to keep such people within, reward them, cherish them. They are, after all, the source of their ideological strength and legitimacy. Instead, they whip them harder than oxen.

His story of the Cultural Revolution sounds like something straight out of Mo Yan’s or Yann Lianke’s novels. In the village he lived in, if any person was seen to have more than anyone else, they were reported. If someone in the village held a banquet, they would be reported. You could not be generous or show hospitality. The only way to win was to suffer. In the stories that the Cuban refugees told, many of them talked about having to eat and cook in secret, so that their neighbors did not know that they had bought food illegally on the black market. Eggs were a luxury, and meat was hard to get. There was no way to build any connection within a neighborhood and the basic humane act of sharing food became something forbidden. Each person treated everyone else with distrust. Society became perverted.

In the events leading up to the Mariel Boatlift in Cuba, there was one particular moment that destroyed the morale of the workers who had remained on the island. That was when their American relatives (the ones who had left in the 1960s) returned to Cuba in the late 1970s and brought lavish gifts, cash, and luxury goods back with them. They showed off photos of their houses, cars, children, lives. The image they projected was that it was America that was truly a worker’s paradise – these relatives, many of them must have been less capable than those who stayed behind, yet they had achieved so much more material prosperity. Those who had been left behind on Cuba had nothing to show for their twenty years of struggle. Nothing to their name. They had to buy groceries on the black market and fight over eggs. They had to hide the food they cooked. They couldn’t show generosity or hospitality because they lived in a state of scarcity. They had survived on empty promises and lived day to day, and now they saw what others had been able to build. The resentment was unparalleled.

Such was the experience of the Chinese who saw the return of their relatives who had fled to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, or other places. However, eventually, the Chinese state chose to collaborate with the prosperous overseas Chinese and let them inject some wealth back into the country, then took credit for it.

The government, instead of putting their strength into improving material conditions, instead put most of their energy into conducting a massive PR campaign on its own citizens. They preferred to control the flow of information and the appearance of events rather than performing actions. Since their basis was ideology, what they constructed was only fluff and fantasy. They could offer no meat to their citizens, nothing of substance. What most people noticed in the events leading up to the Mariel Boatlift was the several events planned by the Cuban government in order to deliberately create a negative image of the refugees: sending agent provocateurs into the Peruvian embassy where many Cubans fled in hopes of getting exit visas, then taking photos, giving out dirt cheap rum to those waiting in the ports to pick up their relatives and then taking and spreading photos of their drunken antics, filling the ranks of refugees with those they let out of prison and the mental asylum to create the image that only the refuse of the country were the ones who decided to leave. Rather than release even the slightest grip on their power, the Cuban government kept clinging to past glory of one year’s fantastic sugar export prices and stating that in twenty years, paradise would surely come.

When comparing the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese government’s continual mismanagement of its own vast resources, the North Korean government’s starvation of its own people, and the Cuban government’s incompetency, the parallels between each of these communist revolutionary states is apparent. There is a fundamental inability to distribute necessities amongst the populace combined with a mass cover-up effort to prevent the citizens from recognizing where fault lies.

Those who came over to the US on the Mariel Boatlift were some of the best among Cuban society – ordinary, working-class people as well as hardworking professionals. These were the people that the Cuban government (or any government) should have been desperately working hard to please and retain. Instead, they whipped them and pushed them out.

Lao Zhang, who swam to Hong Kong and spent decades in sweaty kitchens in America and Europe, had this to say: In that situation, you couldn’t do well. If you had more food than others, you would be beaten. You had to show you were worse than everyone. There was no benefit to working harder because if you got more, you were suspicious. Everyone lived to make everyone else miserable.