[Presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio, Texas.]
Short overview
In 1985, the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro sat down for a series of interviews, spanning twenty-three hours, with the Dominican friar Frei Betto. Among several revealing passages in the text is Castro’s recollection of his education at a Jesuit high school. “I think that in some ways it was not positive,” he explained to Betto. “[E]verything was very dogmatic: ‘This is so because it has to be so’” (Castro 2006, 103). Aside from being unjust, he explained, such dogmatism often proves fruitless. In order for ideas to take effectively hold, one must have an opportunity to reason things out.
Castro’s reflections notwithstanding, more than a handful of Cubans—residents and exiles of the island—would claim that opportunities to “reason things out” remain scarce. After having endured beatings, kidnappings, labor camps, systematized social exclusion, and forced exile, many of those who endeavor to reevaluate certain “revolutionary” principles and policies have reason to question Castro’s commitment to critical thinking. Rather, pervasive propaganda on billboards and in newspapers seems to emulate the Jesuits’ alleged posture: Revolutionary Cuba is so because it has to be so. The revolution will not be criticized.
In the proposed essay, I consider the political dogma that Castro uses to legitimate his régime’s hegemony and find in it elements of what I style as a political theology. In contrast to other usages of the term, I define political theology as the grounding of politics in a self-contained scheme. That is, political theology is presuppositional politics. Designating political theology as presuppositional politics allows us to observe that the demarcation between political philosophy and political theology is not as easily drawn as some, like Mark Lilla in his Stillborn God, might like to presume. At the very least, as the Cuban case demonstrates, it is not as if we can posit politics on one side of a divide, and religion on the other.
At first glance, Castro’s outright repudiation of religion—and the constitution’s identification of Cuba as an atheist state in 1976—would seem to preclude Castro from political theologizing. Yet a belief in transcendence need not be among the assumptions that yield a presuppositional politics. Other dogmata constitute Castro’s Marxist political theology: the sin of economic inequality, the existence of imperialist demons, the paradise of the socialist Cuba to come, and the goodness and authority of the revolutionary state. In some cases, Castro’s political theology is cloaked behind his posture of humanist ethics, uninterested in religion. In others, the régime openly appropriates religious images, such as messianism, apocalypticism, and ethics. Whether concealed or overt, Castro’s speeches and policies are all exacted in the service of his faith in the Marxist project.
In the proposed essay, I offer a comprehensive description of three aspects of the interplay between religion and politics in Cuba: the church’s noteworthy support of the revolution, the messianism evoked by the revolutionary régime, and, finally, Castro’s juxtaposition of faith and dedication to the state. This narrative offers crucial insight to the fact that politics need not locate itself in divine revelation to engage in a kind of theologizing. Indeed, I argue that there is a deep truth to be uncovered in Castro’s intimation that he is “completely in agreement with my name in terms of fidelity and faith. Some have religious faith, and others have another kind. I’ve always been a man of faith, confidence, and optimism” (Castro 2006, 81). Because his politics are not legitimated by divine revelation as such, they do not conform to Lilla’s description of “political theology.” Yet Castro nevertheless demonstrates a sort of atheist political theology, or what he aptly calls “political faith” (Castro 2006, 119).
The presentation of the Cuban history offered in the proposed essay is not designed to brand Fidel Castro as a religious zealot, however. Instead, it finds in the Cuban example a basis for nuancing the kind of account Lilla offers in The Stillborn God,where political thought legitimated by religious reasoning has happily been ousted from modern politics. While Castro’s régime does not align itself with a religious program, it nevertheless legitimates its hegemony with a faith in Marxist creeds. The revision of Lilla’s narrative that the Cuban case prompts enables us to see that there are multiple kinds of political theology—just as there are multiple political theories, and multiple theologies. Most importantly, some allow for a pluralism of political theologies; others do not.
In the proposed essay, I argue that the trouble with Castro’s politics is not that it effects a political theology, but rather that it will entertain no others. As is evident in the Cuban history I present, the presuppositional politics that Castro espouses is clearly antagonistic to its competitors. The revolutionary Cuban régime initially attempted to eliminate its Christian competition by assuming its images, to a measure of success. When the million young people at the Catholic Youth National Congress overwhelmed chants of ¡Fidel! with the name of the local patron—in Castro’s presence—the régime’s strategy of imitation mutated into a strategy of elimination. The revolutionary political theology espoused by the Castro regime could not and does not abide competition or contestation. Could a political theology ever entertain competition? Could a pluralism of presuppositional politics obtain? The Cuban régime’s failure to tolerate plural political theologies, I think, teaches us how crucial tolerance toward competing political theologies is. With this case in mind, I suggest that the “Great Separation” Lilla narrates is not the establishment of some frontier between political philosophy and theology that Lilla portrays, but is the result of that crucial mutual forbearance between divergent presuppositional politics. Such tolerance is, as Lilla would say, something to be thankful for: the Cuban example reminds us of that.