Please tell us about yourself.
My name is Jorge Brioso Bascó. I was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1965. My father worked as a diplomat in London, and my mother and I joined him there and lived there until 1968. We lived in Mexico City between 1974 and 1979. I then studied Philology in Cuba and left the country in 1995. I went to New York to do my Ph.D., and in 2001, I started to work at Carleton College and began to live in Minnesota. That’s where I still am, in the Spanish Department at Carleton.
What does equality mean to you and do you think about it in your personal, social, and professional environments?
Equality is a very important concept for me: it means having the same opportunities to access, to resources, to education, to progress in life, to be judged impartially by the law and the police. But the same way that the term freedom has been kidnapped by the right, equality has been kidnapped by the left: I feel the concept has lost its meaning somehow because it is now used to label so many parts of our private lives that I don’t think are relevant to the concept. The society that I am coming from distorts that concept, in my opinion, too.
What do the terms socialism and socialist ideals mean to you? How are you thinking about them in your past and current environment?
I would like to distinguish between social democracy and socialism. I’m totally in favor of social democracy. It’s the best balance between the welfare state and private initiatives and has proven to offer a more egalitarian society that is centered around respecting the freedom and the initiative of individuals, and this equilibrium between the social and the democracy is essential to it.
Communism, however, destroys the whole fabric of the society and does not give any space for dissent, for a personal initiative, for any entrepreneurial point of view, even for owning private property, which is important—having something that you can claim as yours. I feel this type of socialism has been totally destructive to human beings. Tell me, how is it possible that in every single place where communism was created, it eventually destroyed the country completely? How can one claim an ideal that is so destructive in every single instance? One can make an analogy with religion. Believers always claim that the ideal behind religion is profoundly human and emancipatory but nobody can deny that the institution, the church, has destroyed peoples’ lives and thoughts for thousands of years. What kind of ideal is this, one that is impossible to apply?
What are your own experiences with socialism and socialist thought?
Let’s say it was full immersion! In Cuba, indoctrination happened from when you were born until you died. But I am a bit of an exception because I lived a few years in England, a few years in Mexico, so I had exposure to something that was not socialism in-between living in socialism.
When I returned to Cuba from Mexico, I was fourteen. I knew that I wouldn’t stay in the country, but I didn’t have the resources and knowledge about how to leave the country. I was only a kid living with my parents. But I knew from that moment on that Cuba was not the place for me. Only when I was thirty, I was able to leave.
In Cuba, I studied literature because my goal of studying philosophy would have meant studying Marxism from the Stalinist handbooks of the 1950s. So not even Marx. I did read a lot of philosophy with my friends. In the beginning, our readings were kind of reactive—we didn’t want to have anything to do with socialist thought. But slowly, we began to learn about different traditions, like the Frankfurt School—Marxist traditions that were more appealing to us. That allowed me to come back to Marx, to read him in a different way. Even though there are many viewpoints that I don’t share with Marx, I think he’s a great thinker and writer.
After these informal study sessions in Cuba, I returned to reading philosophy here in the States, when I got my master’s and Ph.D. I began to familiarize myself with different traditions that also claimed to have their roots in the Marxist tradition, like the cultural studies coming from England and thinkers like Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, etc. One thing remained for me after all of this, however: I strongly believe in social democracy, but I have huge reservations when it comes to socialism from the communist tradition.
What do your social networks think about the term socialism?
Well, I live with my wife who comes from El Salvador, where there was a civil war that was sponsored by the United States. She knows all the damage the United States has done to any attempt of finding an alternative government form in Latin America that was not controlled by the U.S. How the American government repressed and destroyed the guerrillas in many countries including El Salvador where the war was extremely bloody and violent. Some of my wife’s family members were tortured. So, in my home, we learn to both compromise because we come from these totally different perspectives on socialism. I think we both learn a lot from each other, and I hope that we have a better understanding of the other person’s perspective now. Many of my friends here in the U.S. have a more idealistic concept of socialism than I do. But I think slowly they learn to listen to me just a little bit more.
It’s a different story, however, between my Cuban friends and myself. I always say that I’m one of the most moderate among them: they don’t want to hear about a positive view of socialism at all. They feel that the way Western media have portrayed communism is totally distorted. For instance, you can have a club in the middle of New York City that is called KGB, with all the paraphernalia you can think of. But could you imagine having a club called Gestapo? It’s impossible. Communists did win the battle against the Nazis and so they were on the side of the Allies, but Communists also killed way more people than National-Socialism and Fascism together.
However, when the main crimes against humanity are defined, the crimes perpetrated by Communist regimes are not always included. This double standard is explained, from my point of view, by two main factors. First, Nazism killed millions, which includes hundreds of thousands of people from the countries that dominated the narrative after the Second World War: USA, England, France. By contrast, Stalin and Mao killed millions of Soviet and Chinese nationals but almost no citizens from the countries I mentioned before. This is, in my opinion, a key factor in the way in which the legacy of the totalitarian systems is told. For instance, when Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, it was considered extremely controversial that she equated the totalitarian states of Hitler and Stalin. Second, international law recognizes genocide, the extermination of a people as the Greek etymological root of this word states, because of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion, but the policide, if you allow me the neologism, the extermination for ideological reasons, do not have the same recognition in international organizations. The only great exception was the condemnation of the Khmer Rouge and their crimes in Cambodia. I assume that the logic behind that is the following: it is assumed that one can choose his or her ideology but not his or her nationality, ethnic group, race, or religion. But this is a sophism. Both are crimes against humanity.
I personally feel the history of the fall of communism has been told totally incorrectly. In China, Cuba, and Korea, communism is still there because it was not imposed by an outside army. In all of the Eastern Bloc countries, what happened was wherever the Soviet Army got there first, that country belonged to the Soviets. Whenever the UK or the United States Army got there first, that country belonged to them. But this geopolitical division was not real: Look at Germany!
The term socialist remains highly contested in U.S. and Western public discourse. Have you seen changes in this discourse in the last few years?
I feel that in the last few years, more and more people in the States, at least from the left, are more comfortable defining themselves as socialist. I don’t know whether that is good or bad. Many of my students say they’re socialists. I don’t know how much understanding they have of the concept, but the term at least doesn’t have the same stigma as it used to have. So that is a change. I remember people in Cuba saying, “What is the definition of a socialist?” And they’d say, “It’s the longest, twisted, most insufferable path between capitalism and capitalism.” Cuba is now poorer, more underdeveloped, with more people living outside the country than ever. But I have been living in the U.S. for long enough to understand that there are many problems here, too.
What can socialist ideals contribute to global crises such as a pandemic, or environmental destruction, poverty, and other issues that our world is grappling with?
Again, we come back to this teaching between social democracy and socialism coming from communism. The Communists were famous for their total disregard for the environment. When the means of production are owned by the state or by private owners, that doesn’t necessarily improve the way in which the resources are used. I feel that in social democracies because the state has a bigger role, the state can have a more active impact.
It’s great that all the young kids are so committed to the environment. But sometimes I feel that it takes away the energy from social justice. Now, social justice is just identity politics. We need some kind of equilibrium between the ecological conscience of the generation and some social justice concern that goes beyond the problem of identity politics.
Thank you for your thoughts, Jorge!
Juliane Schicker talked to Jorge Brioso at Carleton College in November 2021