"Ideological Diversionism", as used by Castro defined the discursive practice of subjects who appropriated Marxist and communist rhetoric without the "true revolutionary commitment".
The "diversionist" thus was a camouflaged subject that spoke as it were from inside the lines of the Revolutionary cadres, but in reality subscribing the vices and habits of bourgeoisie values.
As Raul makes clear at one point during his speech: Ideological diversionism is done through a mediete action on the intelligence, sentiments, and the mind of people.
In one of to the special instructions to the agents of the psychological war, they require focussing their work in local authorities that would influence in the shaping of public opinion.
[1]After Raul Castro's speech in 1972, many State intellectuals conceptualized and redefined the term of ideological diversionism as a concept to put into use in the "struggle" against imperialist heterodox social norms.
In Portuondo's reading, Martí becomes the symbolic figure in which ideological diversionism is neutralized and contained, since there is never a possibility to diverge from what is in the interest of the Nation.
In 1979, a rather different intellectual, the educator Gaspar García Gallo, delivered a lecture entitled "El diversionismo Ideológico" in the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana.
Unlike Portuondo, for Gaspar Gallo "diversionism" was rooted in the structure of human nature itself and it was to be contested from the biological as well as the psychological view of point.
Intertwining dialectical materialism and pseudoscientific theories, a program that was beginning to take shape in the Lenin School of Havana as a pedagogical project, Gaspar Gallo argued that ideological diversionism, rooted in bourgeois vices and habits, was a product of an ill and corrupted nature.
Gaspar Gallo offered, in the vein of naturalist of the 19th century, physiological stereotypes in which one could identified "members" of this psychological tendencies and deviations in the same way that later on students of the Cuban Communist Youth (UJC) will illustrate in the university journal Mella and Alma Mater.
Stalin's deviation differs from the "diversionist" position to the extent that it never seeks to establish a "foreign" influence or a linguistic appropriation of Marxist categories as an aesthetic of concealment.
Another notable work about diversionism from the Soviet Union is Prosčety ideologičeskix diversantov (The Miscalculations of Ideological Saboteurs) by V. I. Strepetov, written in 1976, and translated into Spanish in 1980 by Editorial Progreso.
Strepetov as Raul Castro, sees the danger of diversionism as a flow of ideas coming from the West and that seek to destroy the anti-bourgeois principles of the Soviet Union.
Diversionism is seeing as an activity and even "sabotage" to undermine the different relations and core principles of the soviet people, including labor, discipline, and loyalty.
Confronting the discourses of Western Marxism and the crisis of theoretical paradigms that explicate the new capitalist post-industrial constellation, Strepetov suggests that ideological diversionism fosters a new tool for imperial and United States domination, not through violence and war, but through culture and rhetoric.
Ideological Diversionism was not only a political or juridical term, since it also functioned, even before Raul Castro's speech in 1972, to police conducts and norms of everyday citizens and the production of culture, whether it was fashion, literature, or cinema.
Most of the cultural production censored since the mid-1960s in Cuba - novels like Adire y el tiempo roto (1967) by Manuel Granados, and poetry books like Fuera del Juego (1968) by Heberto Padilla - were judged and accused from the paradigm of diversionism.
It was in the university circles and groups were ideological diversionism was intensified as a hate speech against plural thinking of an array of social actors.
As Mella or Alma Mater, two of the official publications of the University of Havana makes clear, the diversionist were from the "intellectualized student", who wore sandals, carry books by Jean-Paul Sartre and had homosexual conducts, to the bureaucrat, those interested in fashion or even those who would mimic The Beatles' haircuts (see figure 1.).
In everyday life speech, "diversionists" were labeled as "débiles" (weaks), "raros" (weirdos), and "gusanos" (worms), terms that picked out the heterogeneity of social groups that contested the Revolution from below starting in the first decade of the Revolution, as the personal case of Anna Veltfort, an art history student at University of Havana bears witness to it [9] (see Figure 1.).
Hence, a great part of Western Marxism, from Jean-Paul Sartre's humanist existentialism and the Frankfurt School, to Antonio Gramsci and the debates of structuralism and post-structuralism in France, were banned from intellectual and academic circles within and out the University of Havana [10].
Archived 2007-08-02 at the Wayback Machine From an analysis of the politics of memory, many Cubans still remember the usages of ideological diversionism in everyday life, such as in schools, the street, the police, and the televised speeches of Fidel Castro.