Blame Is Someone Else’s: From Pandora to Cuba

From Nepos and Quevedo to Pandora, Eve, and Cuba, a reflection on the enduring human impulse to shift responsibility for failure onto others.

That lovely bolero that says: “Blame me / for whatever happens. / Cover your back with my pain…,” once sung by Lucho Gatica, is a poetic fiction.
The reality is that blame has a unifying vocation: it generates unanimity, because no one wants to bear it.
In the text by Cornelius Nepos (c. 110–24 B.C.), De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men), he has one of his subjects say:
“For it is the custom of kings to attribute adverse events to men and favorable ones to their own good fortune.”
And this royal custom is very human, because it is common to incorporate success into one’s own merit and externalize failure.
Don Francisco de Quevedo, in La Fortuna con seso y la hora de todos, one of his satirical-moral works, returns to this theme.
The text says: “And he who receives and makes into his own blame what he takes for himself should complain about himself, and not about Fortune, which gives it impartially and without malice.”
Quevedo’s idea here is very precise, because fortune is not morally responsible for what a man does with what he receives. If the result becomes blameworthy, the blame belongs to the one who received and acted.
The concept is not the same as in Hamlet’s monologue: “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…” Here, the prince is accusing fortune of wronging him. It is like saying: responsibility for misfortune lies outside me.
In Carmina Burana, Orff presents Fortune as a wheel that subjects man to its power.
Quevedo says that man wants to attribute to an external cause—in this case, bad luck—what should be imputed to his own actions.
And that refusal to assume responsibility for blame is raised to the nth degree when what is at stake is nothing less than responsibility for all the evils in the world.

Pandora

According to Hesiod, it was Pandora who allowed the evils of the world to escape.
Epimetheus made the mistake of accepting her from Zeus and taking her as his wife. Along with the lady, he was given a jar—or a box.
Thus, he ignored the warnings of his brother Prometheus, who had advised him not to accept jars, chests, or Trojan horses given as gifts by Zeus.
Pandora, driven by the curiosity that the gods themselves had bestowed upon her, opened the container, releasing all calamities, diseases, and suffering upon humanity.
The only thing left trapped at the bottom when she closed it was hope.
Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his work Adagia (1508), introduced two fundamental changes to the classical myth, mistakenly translating jar as box. He also rewrote the story, because he assigned responsibility not to Pandora but to her husband Epimetheus.
For the purposes of portraying human folly, he found the name Epimetheus more suitable, since it translates as “the one who thinks too late.”
In the original myth, hope remained trapped inside the jar when Pandora closed the lid before it could escape.
And why hope? They say it is the last thing to be lost…
The meaning of this image has been debated throughout the centuries.
By remaining stored beneath the rim of the container, hope remains safe. But would it not have been better to release it?
Others, such as Nietzsche, argue that it is the worst of all evils, because it makes people believe that their suffering will come to an end.
After all, while confined, it is inaccessible to human beings.

Eve

In the Bible, the figure of Eve bears a strong similarity, because she and Pandora both function as those responsible for human misfortune.
Both Eve in Genesis and Pandora in Greek cosmogony are the first women of creation, fashioned from clay through direct divine intervention.
They do not act out of wickedness, but are driven by the desire to know, discover, or taste what is forbidden. Pandora opens the forbidden vessel—or box; Eve eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Before them, man lived in an idyllic state, free from disease, old age, and fatigue. After their actions, pain, death, and the need to labor painfully upon the land are unleashed upon the world.
In both accounts, woman is presented as the vehicle through which imperfection and misfortune enter man’s paradise.
Just as hope remains in Pandora’s container, in the biblical tradition the promise of redemption and the continuity of life endure.
Both accounts show that the arrival of woman marks the end of the golden age and the beginning of all miseries.
In Genesis, the mechanism of transferring blame can be seen clearly.
God asks Adam whether he has eaten from the tree that He commanded him not to eat from, and Adam replies: “The woman whom You gave to be with me gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”
In doing so, he not only tries to assign blame to Eve, but indirectly also to God, who gave her to him as a companion.
Then the divine question is directed at the woman, and she says: “The serpent deceived me…,” meaning that the serpent is to blame.
The woman is presented as the weakest link in the chain, which explains why the tempter approached her rather than Adam.
Although he, in turn, allowed himself to be seduced by the female voice.
They will all be punished.
The man will eat bread by the sweat of his brow until he returns to the earth: “for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
The woman will give birth to her children in pain and, moreover, God commands her: “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
And if this attempt to distance oneself from blame and place it on someone else has existed since the earliest times, why should it change today?
Is it not, after all, commonplace in political confrontations?
For the sake of brevity, we will give just one example.
The failure of the Cuban communist tyranny, its destitution so often denounced by the courageous journalist Yoani Sánchez, is not the regime’s fault.
When it comes to assigning responsibility for the country’s sad reality, what do the bosses of the island’s government or their countless chorus of supporters scattered throughout the world reply in unison?
The blame lies with the blockade!

Transfer of blame
Myth and responsibility
Blame in politics

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