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Friday, January 12, 2007

Castro has died his time expired

Posted on Thu, Jan. 11, 2007

CUBA
`Castro has died -- his time expired'
BY MANUEL VAZQUEZ PORTAL

Some years ago, when I practiced independent journalism in Cuba, I wrote
that Fidel Castro tired me out. Which is something like that he bored
me. For so long I had been forced to listen to him, to see him, to
tolerate him. Today, he neither tires me nor bores me. I wish I could be
indifferent, because he really doesn't exist. But it seems I can't be
indifferent while Cuba suffers. It's as if I don't have the right to a
scrap of happiness. That irritates me.

It is almost unbearable to me that, while Castro already belongs in the
dark reign of nothingness, his minions, his hatchet men and debtors try
to rescue him from the shadows with hollow hoopla and shoddy shamanism.
Worse yet, even those who don't like him permit themselves to be drawn
into the posthumous farce and keep him in the game of life. Which the
stiff and his mourners are grateful for.

Castro has died because his time expired. It makes no difference if he
languishes as a convalescent or recovers physically to vegetate
eternally in a meaningless limbo. He is a phantom who roams through an
era of ghosts. A goblin who wanders through a nonexistent land. Castro
does not exist, and neither does the country he destroyed while
hallucinating that he was the supreme benefactor. All that's left is
oblivion, an abyss of shadows, a web of atherosclerosis.

Nightmare of failures

The man who dreamed of a heroic death crowned with the aura of
immortality is nothing more than an impure mess wrapped in the nightmare
of failures. But his heirs, distressed by a profound feeling of
orphanhood, want to bring him back to life with invocations of false
glories and poultices of sorcerer's apprentices. They pour into him sour
syrups, bitter teas so he will appear pathetic, spectral when he recites
his incoherences.

And I understand that. They are orphaned witches looking for a new
warlock. While they fabricate the next Lord of the Darkness they
threaten with the reappearance of the old master. Theirs is a phantasmal
government that requires retrospective fear to prevent an explosion.
Careful, the boogeyman is still here! That's the password. That's the
writing on the gate of the other hell now being built. They need time to
maintain the spell, the somnolence, the inertia of a people dulled by
hunger, fear, negligence.

People who wait are docile people, people who don't attack. What's
needed, therefore, is the specter of the king, so he may continue to
haunt Hamlet. There he is. He is your father and he watches you, chases
you, orders you. Meanwhile, life races on and, before people realize it,
the old has been buried and the new has been installed.

That's what they hope for. Nothing else.

Castro will never be able to return to power. Before the last crisis, he
already was an ailing old man. He had collapsed with fatigue during a
public appearance in the town of Cotorro, he had gone sprawling during a
ceremony in Santa Clara, he lost all coherence in his speeches, his hand
trembled uncontrollably and Parkinsonially, his tongue twisted, his
ideas stumbled, his papers jumbled, his irritability ran rampant. Did
all that disappear as a result of García Sabrido's visit to Havana? Come
now, although common sense is the least common of all senses, there are
people in this world with more than two neurons.

Prophet from another land

García Sabrido's visit to Havana only confirmed the theory that these
people want to gain some time and rub the successor's face into the
failure of so many years. On one hand, it manifests the awareness that
Cuban leaders have of their lack of credibility and their willingness to
continue to govern even if they lack all credibility. They need a
prophet from another land so that others may believe what they've been
unable to convey, despite their efforts. On the other hand, they
unscrupulously use the credibility of an authority to create an
expectation that will favor their plans of succession without a
referendum. While the ghost clings to the memory of the people and the
alleged reformers in the nomenklatura, the successor will run fewer
risks and can go prepare the ground.

Manuel Vázquez Portal is a columnist for El Nuevo Herald.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/16431746.htm

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