Cuba - Between Political Repression and the Complicity of the US Left

Cuba: Between Political Repression and the Complicity of the US Left
August 4, 2015
By Isabel M. Estrada (Café Fuerte)

HAVANA TIMES – I am a disciple of Emiliano Zapata. I don't want bread
without freedom or freedom without bread. I want both bread and freedom.
I guess that makes me bourgeois.

The United States and Cuba have reopened their embassies and the US Left
cannot contain its excitement, assuming the island conceals a lost paradise.

Many of us are fuming over the plethora of benefits the Castro regime is
being offered without making any significant concessions. However, I
wonder why we're asking the United States and Obama to do the work for
us…again.

Cuba's situation can only be blamed on the regime, which has stifled the
island for more than five decades. Everyone, however, is partially
responsible as well. I firmly believe that we Cubans, particularly those
of us living abroad, have plenty to blame ourselves for. We talk a lot
and very fast, but we never do anything and we never miss an opportunity
to go back and have our pictures taken at sunny beaches and the cafes
now in vogue…and hand the government easy hard currency. And let's say
nothing of those who bribe everyone they can, with no qualms about
shaking hands of dubious integrity, so that they will get a good slice
of the cake, now that everything is going cheap. Nothing is quite as
disagreeable as this shameless opposition.

Fleeing the Fight

Why should the United States continue to go at it in a fight that we
Cubans have no trouble putting aside?

Hugo Cancio, who runs the digital journal OnCuba – a man who left Cuba
in the Mariel exodus of 1980, incidentally – is taking full advantage of
the situation in Cuba today. He admits most of the money invested on the
island comes from Miami. As a recent article published by The New Yorker
rightly explains, Cancio is a very attractive figure for the Cuban
government: a capitalist Cuban-American who is also a patriot and who
unscrupulously abides by the game rules set down by the Party (it's
Guidelines, as they are called), particularly if he stands to profit
from it. "Cubans like Cancio have deduced that expressions of resentment
won't get them anywhere," the article concludes.

The US Left has also discovered the wonders of the cruelest form of
capitalism in this new Cuba.

It is disheartening to see how those who criticize the worst of an
individualist system that devalues common efforts and penalizes the poor
for their condition pile praise upon praise for the transformation of
Cuba, from a socialist to a market dictatorship – or, to borrow a
friend's concept, the Stalinism-market hybrid they would have us believe
is the best of all worlds.

The positive reaction towards the "rapprochement" process of the Left
and right-wing US entrepreneurs demonstrates that Jose Marti was only
partially right about the "tumultuous and brutal North that despises
us." It reminds me of Casablanca, when Ugarte says to Rick: "You despise
me, don't you?" And Rick replied: "If I gave you any thought, I probably
would."

The Illusion of the Forbidden Fruit

Americans don't despise Cubans, particularly average Cubans without a
dime to their names. They don't even think about them. They only think
about the forbidden fruit, the film images of Havana's nights and
uninhibited sex. Those who stick to an ideological position despite the
evidence in front of them perhaps want to admire a country that stood up
to imperial power, and they cling to their illusions like a hanging man
to a burning nail.

Why do celebrities and multimillionaires travel to Cuba? Are they trying
to divulge the island's great medical breakthroughs, or do they simply
want their pictures taken in Cuba's vintage cars, ironically the heralds
of what is to come?

Yes, US citizens ask themselves what sense there is in maintaining a
failed blockade, a blockade I am also opposed to, as it is one of the
hypocritical foreign policy stances the United States still maintains.
There are no problems with China, but Cuba…well, it's communist. Obama's
actions are an admission of failure. That, perhaps, speaks of the
greatness of the United States.

When I get hard-headed, I ask myself why they should re-establish
diplomatic relations with a brutal and anti-democratic regime. I see two
options: to have blind faith in the market's ability to bring about
democracy or to be completely indifferent to the fate of most Cubans. I
believe these two attitudes describe the positions assumed by the United
States everywhere.

I know what to expect from the US government. What I cannot tolerate is
the position assumed by my friends on the Left. If the only way to have
equality in society is through repression, I don't want that society and
I doubt many people would either. We know that line of reasoning is
fallacious.

Needed Relations

We condemn violence against women in India, genital mutilation in
countries of Africa, the murder of women in Honduras, but we have
nothing to say about the women who are beaten in the streets of Havana
for staging a peaceful protest.

We fight against the United States' overcrowded prison system and its
genocidal effects on the black population, but we keep quiet about the
declining living conditions of black people in Cuba, their growing
exclusion from sources of hard currency and the growing numbers of black
people living in poor neighborhoods or in prison.

Diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba are needed. The
United States doesn't have to solve these problems. We Cubans ought to
do so. The United States, however, should at least condemn this regime a
little more emphatically.

On July 20, Enrique Pumar, head of the Sociology Department of the
Catholic University of America, went on the radio show Kojo Nnamdi and
said that the two governments should make an effort to move forward,
because it is of "no help" if, in the midst of negotiations, human
rights abuses continue to be perpetrated in Cuba. "That doesn't help. In
any democracy, elected leaders have to answer to the public and when
people see these thing on the news, they become disillusioned," said the
academic.

I would like to know what democracy and what elected leaders Pumar was
referring to. Imagine the reaction people would have if someone said
that it doesn't help that ISIS continues to kill people, that bloggers
continue to be flogged in Iran or that Saddam Hussein keeps imprisoning
and torturing opponents. It certainly doesn't help those being beaten,
that's true.

Ah, but it's not the same, see, because health and education are free in
Cuba.

Source: Cuba: Between Political Repression and the Complicity of the US
Left - Havana Times.org - http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=113043