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Friday, August 14, 2015

At the End of the Day, Yankees or no Yankees?

At the End of the Day, Yankees or no Yankees? / Cubanet, Miriam Celaya
Posted on August 12, 2015

Cubanet, Miriam Celaya, Havana, 10 August 2015 — The digital version of
Cuba's most official newspaper, Granma, has once again published an
article harping on the issue of nationalization of businesses and other
US properties in Cuba which took place in 1960.

A few weeks before, the same lampoon had made reference to the matter,
which, curiously, is one of the items on the agenda currently being
negotiated by the governments of both countries.

The insistence on the subject should not be random, though it is
inconsistent if we take into consideration that the public event that
transpired 55 years ago, in front of a delirious crowd that filled the
Estadio del Cerro, when Castro I – along with his younger brother,
current negotiator General-President – proclaimed, microphone in hand,
possessed by his own soul and by force of populism, the Law that in one
swift stroke expropriated some thirty properties belonging to "the
Yankee imperialism." The very same "imperialism" (or could it be
another?) that the very same old Cuban government (and no other) is
crying out for, without mediating explanation for such a radical reversal.

In fact, now the 'villain' is being offered a welcome with privileges:
if in 1960 US companies coexisted in Cuba with majority private property
of domestic capital, the impending return of the vilified Yankee capital
would enjoy rights that Cubans do not have, since the latter are
excluded from the possibility of investing in their own country.

However, the elders of the Palace of the Revolution insist that "we have
triumphed over the Empire" and that we are "more sovereign and
independent" than ever. That is, US companies are now welcome in Cuba,
not because the structural crisis of the Castro regime has become
insurmountable or because the absolute ineptitude of the Castro saga to
even manage the wealth that was seized by spurious laws has plunged the
country into poverty, but because the 'imperialism' has finally become
reasonable after being symbolically beaten for over half a century "by
the resilience and revolutionary convictions" of this people.

Thy dollars cometh onto us

Nothing shows Cuban deterioration as much as the artificial
glorification of the past. Unimaginative and lacking in political
capital, old revolutionaries continue to choose to appeal to an epic
nobody is interested in, except the morbid curiosity of a globalized
world that views the Island as a Jurassic stronghold of the Cold War
that includes species that are extinct elsewhere, such as dictators
satiated with impunity and people who are as meek as sheep.

However, despite the verbal energy of Granma's writers,
General-President Castro II seems to have forgotten his impromptu speech
on that July 6, 1960 afternoon, when he took advantage of his older
brother's momentary loss of voice to show off his vocation as
unrepentant lackey in all its splendor, and to improvise a little snack
of exalted mystical inspiration, praising the virtues of the leader in
his conquest of "glory that belonged to only him" and in addition
proclaiming "our America" as the "true one."

It was at that event where "Cuba sí, Yankees no" was born, the famous
slogan that the most hardened ventriloquists of the vernacular flock
were bleating until just yesterday.

Now, when it's clear that the fiery leader of the past is not eternal,
and when the octogenarian heir to the estate-in-ruins gazes at the
fields overrun by the invasive marabou weed covering the landscape of
what was once an orchard, it seems that, beyond the official discourse
designed to please idiots, the "real" America is no longer "ours," but
the one that rises north of the Rio Grande.

Everything indicates that the following also ceased to be: "the duty of
the peoples of Latin America must be to tend to the recovery of their
national wealth, removing them from the domain of monopolies of foreign
interests that impede their progress, promote political interference and
undermine the sovereignty of our peoples." It just so happens that new
times are in effect, where foreign capital has mutated, from onerous for
the people to advantageous, even for this anti-imperialist
Island-lighthouse-of all the Americas, where the same politically
immutable old leaders remain attached to power, gobbling up the nation,
as if they were lampreys.

Soap Opera Journalism

This is why the official press becomes increasingly improbable, to the
point of mimicking the plot of a Latin American soap opera, the kind
where "nice" characters spend their lives suffering ridiculously from
the first to the next-to-last episodes, to end up happy and forgiving
"the bad guys" in the final episode.

The plot of the soap opera-lampoon offered by Granma, where once there
was an enlightened leader followed by his people and where crowds
foolishly hailed the foreign plunder without realizing that this is the
best way to legitimize their own, aims to insert that shameful past in
the context of reconciliation between the spurned lover (Cuba) and the
feckless lover (the United States) who returns for the re-conquest,
always convinced of his power of seduction

But, at the same time, the lover-victim of so many excesses and
cruelties by the faithless lover feels she must prove to the native
audience that, once she falls again (into the arms?) of the irresistible
charmer, she does not commit a sin of weakness, or better yet, of
imperative need for survival, but that – quite the contrary – this an
unquestionable proof of her ("our") political and moral superiority.

At any rate, the leap turns out to be at least counterproductive. It is
as absurd to try to attract foreign capital on the one hand and to shake
the memory of nationalizations that undermine this capital on the other.
It could be stated that two governments and two parallel strategies
exist in Cuba, and if any revolutionary has survived, it might be
creating a regrettable confusion for him.

The current olive-green deputies of mass manipulation should consider
not only the ambiguity of the discourse, but – at the level of farce
that they have chosen – understand that many consumers prefer negative
soap opera characters over heroes and heroines. They assume,
judiciously, that it is preferable to enjoy oneself most of the time and
to suffer only once than the other way around. It is not by chance that
the only thing that is growing in Cuba at such leaps and bounds as
apathy or uncertainty is the number of people fleeing the glorious
national poverty to benefit from the evils of imperialism. They have
chosen the villain.

Meanwhile, inside Cuba, and without speeches from the grandstands, the
xenophobic slogan of the popular romance years with the olive-green hero
(Cuba sí, Yankees no) has changed radically. Today, the island is awash
in American flags and the most vilified symbols of the American way of
life; the slogan is now "Cuba yes and Americans too." And if our
revolutionary glory days of the past are good for one thing it is to
mourn the irreparable loss of these 56 years of suffering between
capitalism and capitalism.

Translated by Norma Whiting

Source: At the End of the Day, Yankees or no Yankees? / Cubanet, Miriam
Celaya | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/at-the-end-of-the-day-yankees-or-no-yankees-cubanet-miriam-celaya/

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