Pavlov and Freud Based Propagandas (From Seremos Como el Che to Abajo la Escoria)

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“One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was an specialist in hypnopaedia. Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World).
Every morning since I entered school at age five and continuously during six years until I reached age twelve; together with thousands of other children across the nation I’m obliged to salute the flag and shout aloud “Pioneros por el Comunismo, Seremos como el Che!” (Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che). We have to do this five days a week at eight in the morning during six consecutive scholar years, making a total of approximately one thousand eleven hundred and forty days of exclamations of allegiance and commitment to Che Guevara and to Communism.
Propaganda is a set of techniques aimed at provoking a series of changes in the personality of the individual enclosed by the mass. Jacques Ellul enumerate three schools of propaganda that are based on three different psychological theories: The Pavlovian school, the Freudian school and the Deweyian school. “Stalinist propaganda was in great measure found on Pavlov theory of the conditioned reflex, Hitlerian propaganda was on great measure founded on Freud’s theory of repression and libido. American propaganda is founded in great measure in Dewey’s theory of teaching” (Ellul 5). Stalinist propaganda appropriates Ivan Pavlov’s theory of conditional reflexes trying to build a conceptual basis for a set of techniques. Pavlovian based propaganda, first used by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and later perfected by Joseph Stalin, consists mainly of hammering auditory and visual stimuli such as slogans, phrases, symbols and signs, songs, poems, hymns, speeches, etc, into the mind of the receiver for long periods of time, constantly and consitently, until a conditioned reflex is build into the mind of the individual.
After consecutive repetitions a dog makes an association between lunch-time and a light bulb turning on. The dog had learned that food comes in after the light turns on, and it starts salivating in expectancy of his need about to be satisfied. Martial artists have used the same technique with success; they throw punches and kicks day after day, year after year until the become conditional reflexes in a combat situation.
The Cuban pioneer has been conditioned to salivate in hunger and expectancy every morning at the sounds of the phrase “Seremos como el Che”. We have learned that by the time we become adults we all will be like Che Guevara. And being like Che means holding the same qualities of stoic guerrilla warrior who’s asthma didn’t preclude him from going to the mountains, whose character led him to create volunteer work –“trabajo voluntario”- and whose spirit is a lighthouse to follow for the oppressed around the world.

I suppose all the members of my generation are feeling demoralized by now because none of us has been capable of living up to Che Guevara’s ideals of a New Man. After all, one thousand, one hundred and forty times screaming “seremos como el Che can create an unconditional reflex, but it cannot bend reality*. Ironically, Stalinist propaganda has just created anger and frustration since the signal that used to provoke stimulation were never followed by the satisfaction of needs and fulfillment of expectancies.
But Cuban propaganda is not only made of Pavlovian elements. As Ellul says, “ the aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas but provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a choice but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transform an opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief” (Ellul 25).
Cuban propaganda techniques include also Freudian based elements.
The case of Anna O, described by Freud in 1910, proclaimed that unconscious memories and emotions associated to painful events strive to find release through neurotic symptoms. You may be able to recall that you were punished while you were a child but you cannot recall why. “What were those ideas or thoughts that would be repressed and rendered unconscious? Freud believed that they were wishes. During the traumatic event, a wish had been aroused that went against the person’s ego-ideal. Because it is hard for people to accept the fact that they are not what they like to be, such incompatibility causes pain. If it causes too much pain, the wish is repressed ” (Engler 33). Freudian based propaganda has been built out of the conception that the person needs to be enabled to release tension and realize his wishes and impulses without any feelings of remorse or guilt. To this aim Hitlerian propaganda has to present the individual with an orchestration of hate building devices while creating the means to get him release his aggressive impulses. Jews are degraded and portrayed as rats so that the object of propaganda would be not able to apply his moral value judgments against a person. The Jew, rendered an animal, would fall into the same category of morality that animals are placed into; they have no rights, that is. In any case the only moral right for the Nazi is the right of the superio being to whatever he pleases against the inferior creature.
The same way that repressed unconscious wishes come back with redoubled strength in the form of neurotic symptoms and all sort of problems, social neurotic symptoms of repressed unconscious forces need to be released from time to time. A sort of compromise need to be reached in political rallies and demonstrations or by using the fascination of involvement in a nationalistic mystique through sport events, public music festival and all sorts of cultural activities.

The repressed instincts and cathartic release theory occupies no small part of Cuban governmental handling of complex social situations of anger and frustration. Periodically Cuban population show signs of accumulated anxiety and internal psychological conflicts as a byproduct of the overall state of austerity and high demands imposed on them, the lack of rewards and years of expectations and unfulfilled promises. The discord and unrest accumulated needs to find release. If sports and popular musical events are not enough to provoke cathartic release –and sometimes it doesn’t-- people can take the streets spontaneously and demonstrate their opposition to governmental policies. Every time the social pressure is about to break asunder the meticulously assembled social fabric, a valve of release needs to be open. This has happened in very decade of the revolution and some of the most notorious cases are the Mariel boatlift in 1980, the Maleconazo and the subsequent Guantanamo Bay exodus in 1994.
In 1980 I was a high school student at pre-universitario Jose Marti in old Havana. I remember my class, together with the students of all other classes, be taken from our classroom to join a demonstration against the so called “scum” that had decided to get into the Peruvian Embassy in Havana to apply for a visa to leave the country. We marched together with hundred of thousands of people from every sector of society to shout offensive words and rise our fists in contempt against the opprobrious “vende-patrias” –country sellers-- that had dared to swap the goodness of the revolution for the promises of a life under capitalism. Too young to realize what the whole thing was about, it was beyond my grasp to know that Freudian mechanisms of accumulated repression and anxiety and the subsequent cathartic release were being executed at a social level, involving hundred of thousand, probably million of participants.
To my memory come scenes of outmost disgust that happened the following days of the Peruvian Embassy incident: My friends and I are walking back from our physical education class at the sport complex Ciudad Deportiva. While we are walking to the bust stop we see an old lady walking down the street trying to get into a taxi cab. She is surrounded by a mob screaming any imaginable odious expletives at her while spitting at her face and blocking her entrance into the taxicab stopping by. She is impeded to get into any car, thus obliged to stand the ire of the mob and their salivations. We, teen comrades, couldn’t understand the irrationality of the situation, except that she was been insulted and degraded because of trying to get into a boat from Mariel to Miami. We walked away and got into a bus, consciously or unconsciously shocked by what we had just witnessed. We moved toward the back of the bus to be left alone with our own business as most teens do when they are in groups. One of us asked to re-create the scene with him playing the old lady and the rest of us playing the mob yelling hateful slurs and pretending to spit in his face. We did it, we screamed and shout out at him every kind of bad words, insults and deriding gestures that we could have rendered possible, we put all our creativity and energy at playing the mob. Perhaps that was our way to cope with the traumatizing event. We, the actors performing in the back of the bus the superbly practiced role of young men exerting our will against the inferior animal creature, recreating that day all the stages of Stalinist and Hitlerian propaganda.
What we have just witnessed minutes before was one the countless Freudian propaganda events that anyone could have seen during those years. Unfortunately, scenes like the one I described still occur today**.

*Whether Wikipedia’s claim that Fabio Grobart may have recruited Fidel Castro in 1948 as an Stalin operative is true or not there is no doubt that putting into realization the plan for the construction of the New Man required the implementation of Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflex. If Fidel Castro was recruited by Grobart Fidel may have been taught in the basics of Pavlovian propaganda as part of his training as an intelligence operative. If he was never recruited still there is the fact that conditional reflex is the basis for the shaping of the personality of the Cuban child during his years of schooling as a Pionero.

**Some similar events that have occurred recently includes: harassment and use of force against the group of wives of political prisoners Las Damas de Blanco by mobs and undercover agents; harassment and use of force to impede the mother of dead by hunger strike political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo to go to church to pray for the soul of his son and to go to the cemetery to cry for him.
Bibliography:
1) Jacques Ellul. Propaganda. The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Vintage Books. Random House, NY. 1973.
2) Barbara Engler. Personality Theories. 8th Ed. Union County College.