The longer they stay in power, the worse and more twisted the expressions of degradation become.
By Miguel Henrique Otero (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The degradation of men in power is directly proportional to the time they remain. We know this well: the longer they stay at the top, the worse and more twisted the concrete expressions of degradation become.
Just reading a biography of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, or Teodor Obiang Nguema, written by rigorous historians, is enough to see the similarities that arise across countries and eras among dictators. They are astonishing, as if the degradation of the powerful follows general patterns that reproduce anywhere and anytime.
The degradation I speak of is expressed in a range of behaviors. From the variations of these behaviors, great novelists like Miguel Angel Asturias in Mr. President, Mario Vargas Llosa in his masterful The Feast of the Goat, or Gabriel García Marquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch, have constructed characters perverted during their exercise of power. Besides being extraordinary exercises of fiction, these works provide us with tools to understand the Putins, Ortega-Murillos, or Maduros of our time.
A phenomenon I want to note here is the fear that inevitably penetrates dictators. The longer they hold power, the more their sense of illegitimacy grows, and a constant state of fear of imagined or real enemies sets in. Paranoia is a kind of affliction of the dictatorial species. Therefore, in their gloomy thoughts and nightmares, conspiracies, betrayals, stabbings in the back, disloyalties, and infidelities repeat themselves.
This path of paranoia is inse