Getting Closer to an Academic Milestone in a Harsh Context

I have just submitted the final version of my doctoral thesis to the committee that will evaluate me in mid-July. It has been a long journey to get here, marked by the contradiction between my passion for scientific research and the pressing needs of the Cuban context. From Marx to more contemporary epistemologists like Mario Bunge, it has been clear that the researcher needs peace of mind and resources to dedicate themselves to the scientific enterprise.

My research, which focused on conceptualizing the U.S. political cybersubversion against Cuba based on the recovery of vast, comprehensive empirical material, could have been finished even more than a year ago had it not been for the fact that throughout this time I redirected my efforts toward spaces like Hive, where I have been able to secure a level of monetary resources—sometimes sufficient, sometimes not—for supporting my family's economy.

The final version differs considerably from the one submitted for the pre-defense exercise. One could say they are two different studies, except for the critical systematization of the theory of (cyber)subversion and the detailed analysis of the efforts of successive U.S. administrations—since 1959—to exploit information and communication technologies to overthrow the revolutionary political system.

The two versions responded to different goals. The first aimed to develop a theoretical-methodological conception to actively counter cybersubversion, with concrete measures anchored in a technoscientific perspective. The interest then was to critically extrapolate to Cuba certain perspectives from Western technoscience, such as social cybersecurity—that is, viewing cybersecurity beyond threats to physical infrastructure—, whose nerve center is at Carnegie Mellon University.

From a methodological standpoint, the main practical approaches in social cybersecurity focus on network analysis and agent-based models. The deployment of this transdisciplinary field responds to the political interests of its funders in the U.S. military, meaning that, like all science—including the one I have just produced with great respect and modesty—it is situated. The proposal to critically introduce this approach in Cuba is there but unvalidated, so for the defense, I had to decide between validating that result—something difficult in this context of great crisis here, which has led to the interruption of normal teaching processes and life in general—and offering something more measured, like a conceptualization of U.S. political cybersubversion, which is what I ultimately decided.

Now, the degree I am pursuing is a Doctorate in Philosophical Sciences. Although I am convinced that there was quite a bit of philosophy in the first version—sometimes, I admit, too implicit—, one remark from the pre-defense committee was precisely to make the philosophical approach more explicit. Then, although doctoral candidates in this program graduate with a degree in Philosophical or Sociological Sciences, in truth, it is grounded in the STS field—the Cuban National Commission for Scientific Degrees has only recently approved this specific degree. Thus, I was called upon to assume specific theories from this tradition. For the former—the philosophical approach—I took the opportunity to study Marxian materialist dialectics in detail for the first time.

This perspective, which I assumed from the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, without any mediation—that's why I speak of something Marxian rather than "Marxist"—, prescribes a specific way of understanding and approaching complex social phenomena, which is not reduced to joining the induction-deduction and analysis-synthesis pairs. It is ultimately interested in revealing the strong interconnection that exists among all the fronts that make up the social, particularly in the interplay between the productive base and the sociopolitical organization.

To meet the required demands associated with the STS field, I rested on the approaches of Langdon Winner and his theory of the politics inherent to certain artifacts—in my case, the Washington-funded sociotechnical subversive products—and Andrew Feenberg's notion of "technical code," which thematizes the struggle of different and unequal actors to inscribe their interests in the technical-legal development of cyberspace. The conceptualization I introduce understands U.S. political cybersubversion against Cuba as

a modality of political activity institutionally reproduced by the U.S. state, whose contemporary form of existence rests on the articulation of specialized networks of actors and the strategic appropriation of cyberspace's sociotechnical conditions to produce artifacts aimed at shaping the interpretation of Cuban reality, eroding the legitimacy of its institutions, and favoring political transformations congruent with U.S. strategic interests.

The strength of the conceptualization is not in the fact that it was built from a dialectical perspective, but rather in the copious empirical evidence that serves as its basis. Generally, Cuban researchers interested in this issue produce a priori evaluations of this phenomenon without immersing themselves in the concrete empirical world. This makes their contributions vulnerable because they cannot withstand the demand for evidence to defend, for example, that Cuba is the object of an active unconventional warfare campaign.

The correspondence between certain cybersubversion practices and the definitions contained in U.S. doctrinal documents on unconventional warfare does not per se demonstrate the existence of a relationship. The same occurs when referring to Gene Sharp's doctrine of nonviolent action solely because a certain action corresponds to one of its postulates. Without denying the possibility of involvement by Special Operations Forces in the U.S. regime change program against Cuba, I focused on the existing evidence, which points to the integration of this process into the so-called U.S. foreign assistance industry, abruptly and profoundly reconfigured by the second Trump administration.

Even in this context, and partly thanks to the strategic presence of congressmen like Cuban-American Mario Díaz-Balart at the helm of the critical House Appropriations National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Subcommittee, and Marco Rubio's Cuban ancestry, the Cuba "democracy" program has been among the most stable amidst all the upheaval. A project lacking impact but symbolic for Cubans in Florida and their representatives in Washington, like Radio Martí—now embedded within the Martí Noticias platform—resisted the onslaught of the Musk era.

Many more productive things were thrown overboard. For the current fiscal year, 25 million dollars were approved for the Cuba program—activated by the defunct USAID in 1996—and 30 million for Martí Noticias. It is to be expected that foreign assistance will return to a calmer course—never the same as before—after Trump's departure. I tried to produce something that is more important than the concept itself, which is the prescription of a way to exhaustively traverse the phenomenon and reconstruct it as a concrete and thought totality in every moment of its development. In July, I'll let you know what the committee thought.