Recent accounts of Cuba are what ethicists call “bottom-up”. They draw upon what people say – in the streets, in resorts, in taxis. Such accounts claim to be objective because they start from the lives and stories of people, as described and told by them.
The claim to objectivity is naïve. The stories we hear and how we hear them depend upon values and expectations. Some values and expectations have more influence than others. The playing field for stories is not equal.
Recently, I read yet another account by a North American intellectual who traveled to Cuba for the first time. She spoke to Cubans and reported what they said: They want better cars, more freedom to choose. They’d like elections like those in the U.S. She drew conclusions, some of them insightful.
The problem is not that the views she reported are uninteresting or unworthy of respect. They are not. Rather, the problem is a complete lack of awareness of the stories that are not heard by her, because they can’t be, because they are unexpected, and because they are hard.
Cuban writer, Miguel Barnet, introducing The Biography of a Runaway Slave, writes that Estevan Montejo, whose story about escaping slavery is told in the first person, did not write an autobiography.[i] As a story about a human being, it depends on others. It is not, and can’t be, an individual story.
Montejo’s story could not be heard as the story it is, about a person, without the decades-long armed struggle that…