False Friends

False Friends
Fidel's newfound supporters are doing ordinary Cubans no favors.
By Raul Rivero
Newsweek International

March 20, 2006 issue - Political leaders in Latin America, intoxicated
by a bad case of populism, are preparing a safe landing for Fidel Castro
and his grim dictatorship. In a region that Castro bloodied with his mad
policy of fomenting guerrilla wars, where a number of countries lost
worthy citizens in misguided attempts to replicate his armed rebellion
in the late 1950s, presidential palaces have been seized by the left
through the same democratic means that those insurgents of yesteryear
tried to destroy with bombs and bullets.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez provided the first and most important
pillar of support to Castro. Now come gestures of solidarity from Evo
Morales. The onetime leader of Bolivia's coca farmers views the Cuban
president-for-life as a good man and a democrat, and never tires of
telling interviewers so. In the backdrop of this dismal tableau, waving
flags and full of smiles, are Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
Uruguay's Tabaré Vázquez and Argentina's erratic Nestor Kirchner.
Bringing up the rear are the Peruvian presidential candidate Ollanta
Humala and the front runner in Mexico's presidential campaign, Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador.

This claque of politicians is guilty of the serious crime of flagrant
opportunism. To appease their impatient left-wing constituents and
maintain a semblance of calm at home, they shake the hands of Cuban
officials who have installed a system they themselves reject as a matter
of principle. They travel to the Cuban beach resort of Varadero, they
express their support for Havana and receive in return Cuban doctors and
cigars.

The problem lies not just with politicians. Associations of friends of
Cuba have been created in certain sectors of Latin American civil
society, and a select and erudite group of intellectuals sees in Cuba a
rented version of their dream. Once a year they visit their illusion,
and senior officials in Havana welcome them like chiefs of state,
publishing their books with government funds and herding them into
venues where they are applauded. But their dream is the living nightmare
of the ordinary Cuban, the man in the street who is overlooked,
forgotten and marginalized.

Indeed, all these figures are helping to perpetuate in a neighboring
country what they would never accept in their own: the food-ration card
that dates back to 1962, a totally controlled press, a legal gag order
on free thought, and paramilitary brigades with clenched fists on the
lookout for counterrevolutionary tendencies. For me, who like so many
other Cubans wound up in jail for daring to speak out and report on the
harsh realities in my country, the public, uncritical embrace that
certain political leaders bestow on Fidel Castro only serves to prolong
the suffering of my people. He milks those encounters for all the
propaganda he can to feed to his apparatchiks.

There are many different Cubas within Cuba, and the poorest and most
populous of these Cubas has been forsaken by all of Latin America. With
the exception of Costa Rica, all the countries of the region, thanks to
the attitudes of their elected leaders, are in effect treating their
Cuban brethren with hatred and suspicion. But one way or another the
Cuban people will emerge from their hell, and hopefully in the not too
distant future a free Cuba will extend a hand of friendship to those
same countries that have turned their backs on its citizens.

Rivero is a prize-winning journalist and poet who was jailed for
political reasons with dozens of other Cuban dissidents in March 2003.
He was released from prison on medical grounds in the fall of 2004 and
now lives in Madrid.

2006 Newsweek, Inc.
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