Pro-Castro Foolishness

Pro-Castro Foolishness / Luis Felipe Rojas
Posted on February 28, 2016

"There will be no impunity for the enemies of the fatherland, for those
who intend to endanger our independence." — Raúl Castro, 3 August 2010.

Luis Felipe Rojas, 28 February 2016 — Attention, all who rabidly applaud
the Obama-Francisco-Castro pact: it is worthwhile to make difficult
proposals, ask inconvenient questions, and bother the military beast
that has run the Island with the trembling hands of whisky hangovers.

Oh, no? Not in your plans? It must be said again and again, because
after the hugs have come the kisses, and who knows what else. Among
secretaries of agriculture, lady mayors, aide-de-camps, successful
businesspeople, and rock superstars, there must be somebody left with a
little shame who will make it known to Raúl Castro that his outstretched
hand should go in another direction, he should look the people in the
eye and quit posing for a photograph that will take on a sepia tone
faster than his egomania can stand it.

Muriel Bowser, Lady Mayor of Washington, visited Cuba last week and said
that she wants an educational system similar to that in Cuba for her
fellow citizens. Was she including among this the Study-Work method —
that she was taken to see — which Cuban instituted to put an end to the
family and turn common citizens into robots? Does Her Ladyship know that
Cuban children are obligated to shout that they want to be like Ché
Guevra, and that from repeating it so much they become so, barely out of
adolescence?

Those children who were so excited to be like Ché Guevara left the
country to kill Africans that they had never met, and returned bearing
all the traumas of war, turned into fat fifty-somethings, who today run
a plastics factory or a Rapid Response Brigade (those at-the-ready to
shout down — or even beat down — any display of non-conformance with the
regime).

Could it be that no superstar, before giving a concert or going out to
enjoy mojitos and pork chunks, will ask Castro to disarm the
surveillance mechanism that keeps an eye even on the intimate apparel of
every Cuban woman? The wizened stool-pigeon of the neighborhood, the
"honorary official," the "specialist" of State Security who controls
every provincial cultural center, even the thug who organizes a raid on
dissidents — they are all part and parcel of that magic that today
enthralls the political tourists when they gaze upon Raúl Castro. He is
the criminal with whom they pose and will be seen in the Times, the
Washington Post, or the now "spotless" and
in-the-running-for-an-Oscar Boston Globe.

It will never be to late to align oneself to infamy. So, start running
today to Havana, stroll around sporting your little container of bottled
water, take a whiff of that 21st Century dungheap that has been sold to
you as the best-educated nation of Latin America. Forget about the
penitentiary system, of the fear among neighbors, of the violence that
can just as easily decapitate with machetes as take a youth's life by
kicking him until his spinal cord is crushed in the police station at
Zanja and Dragones streets.

Go and tell the world that Cuba has changed, that the island is a paradise.

Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Source: Pro-Castro Foolishness / Luis Felipe Rojas | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/pro-castro-foolishness-luis-felipe-rojas/