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Sunday, January 18, 2015

Look at Me, Miami and, If You Value Your Death, Don’t Cry

Look at Me, Miami and, If You Value Your Death, Don't Cry / Orlando Luis
Pardo Lazo
Posted on January 18, 2015

Alan Gross, like every North American who comes in contact with the
Castro regime and defends it even from within a captivity of little lies
— attacking his own government with million-dollar demands — is a bad
man. Gross's little suicide threats, his lack of solidarity with Cubans
in exile and civil society on the Island, his backward religiosity of
psalms and miracle-mongering, his complicit silence as to the
assassinations committed by the Castro regime while he was supposedly in
prison, his lawyer subsidized by Havana, his support of the lifting of
an embargo that had not appeared to be his concern when he was
contracted by USAID, his servile flattery of President Obama, his
admiring loyalty to the sacrosanct balls of Raúl, his suspicious loss of
dentition at the record pace of one tooth per year, his (and his wife's)
insipid leftist pose, in short, what a fossil, what fealty, what
Submerged States of Fidelity…

Meanwhile, the triumphal return to the Island of the 5 deadly spies,
with their muscles worthy of hand-to-hand combat, their vacant stares of
those who know themselves to be puppets of a dismal power that can
pulverize them at any time, with their exaggerated dentitions,
surrounded by a people who for decades have not been even plebes, a
perverse and impoverished populace, terrified in their fear that swings
from meanness to mediocrity, jabbering with the neighbors in a language
that we free Cubans do not know because it is a jargon of the stable, of
the State.

My Fellow Cubans, let us not kid ourselves. The stupidity of our country
can be reined-in by taking advantage of this umpteenth criminal juncture
in our history. We will never live in liberty. The Earth is cursed
against our volatile beauty. The race that inhabits the Island is
infected and cannot be decontaminated. The lucid ones, the virtuous
ones, escape without ever looking over their shoulders, or else they
will pay the brave price of being martyrs killed in cold blood, like the
holy souls Laura Pollán and Oswaldo Payá.

The stampede cannot be stopped now in Miami. It is too late for us to
remain so close to evil. We must run away, further and further to the
north of the world. Throughout generations upon generations, the
Castroites have become millionaires in South Florida. Castroism is the
factual and media-conscious law in the Cuban exile community. It is the
majority. The Cuban-American sensibility in itself is an insular
invention: with that nostalgia bent-over and submissive to a frigid
Fidelism, with that vernacular that sounds taken out of Google Talk,
with those gold trinkets of 19.59 carats and eyebrows groomed to
delirium. Please.

The legislators of Florida count for nothing. What does rule is the
corrupting power of the mafias that Fidel has institutionalized in
Miami, from the church to the academy, from the marinas to the
slaughterhouses, from the swamp to the cane field, from the airport to
its horrendous museums and mausoleums, with their fairs and their
colleges and their constant kitsch, from the restaurants to the
Revolution itself.

Miami has made its best effort, but today Miami is millions of Alan
Grosses and Five Heroes. Forget all that about them being spies, My
Brothers and Sisters. Miami is the pure heroism of unpunished horror.
The Battle of Florida was lost. Not even Castro won. Miami won, which
reproduced and grounded a kind of Castroism little by little during
decadent decades. Take a look in the malls, My Poor People–take those
little checkered shirts that are sold in bulk off their hangers. You'll
see the labels of Cuban State Security, My Poor Love. The tackiness and
the vulgarity. It's the dirty trick somewhere between magic and
secretiveness. As in Cuba, there is not even one word said by Cubans
that isn't false. Castroism is that: the outer shell of Cubanness, its
disposability, its hahaha.

My Fellow Cubans, it is time to recognize that not only do we not want
changes in our nation, but that we abundantly want to never again have a
nation. The experience of having been subjects of the Kingdom of Death
is irreparable. Now we will all die very alone, somnolent in a peevish
rhetoric that debases us. We deserve to remain dead for the rest of our
lifeless biographies.

Nobody is sadder than we. Nobody is more "We" than I.

Translated by Alicia Barraqué Ellison

18 December 2014

Source: Look at Me, Miami and, If You Value Your Death, Don't Cry /
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/look-at-me-miami-and-if-you-value-your-death-dont-cry-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/

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