The scaffolding of totalitarian resilience: sacrificial legitimacy and the management of failure in the Cuban Revolution

This article develops the concept of sacrificial legitimacy to explain the resilience of the Cuban revolutionary regime in the face of chronic economic crisis, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and eroding material expectations. In critical dialogue with the literature on authoritarianism and with Cuban historiography, it argues that Castroism’s durability cannot be accounted for solely by legitimation, repression, and co-optation or by state–party organizational strength but requires attention to the sacralization of collective suffering as a source of authority. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic theory and scholarship on political religions, the article conceptualizes the Cuban Revolution as a regime of sacrificial legitimacy that turns scarcity, discipline, and violence into tests of ideological purification tied to a symbolic debt to national martyrs—a debt that obligates only so long as its sacrificial framing remains misrecognized. It traces this mechanism across three historical phases and contends that, in the post-Fidel era, the shift towards barren sacrifice reframes hardship as illegitimate violence, eroding voluntary compliance and opening space for new forms of civil resistance. A contrast with Iran’s contemporaneous crisis specifies when that erosion takes contained rather than violent form.