A blunt response to Bush

By Weekly Archive On Oct 31, 2007

During
the recent speech delivered by George W. Bush reaffirming his hard
line toward Cuba, the degree of ignorance and irresponsibility
displayed by the president about the topic of Cuba was surpassed only
by the irrelevance of the U.S. strategy to somehow influence the
Cuban reality.

If it
weren’t because those who counsel the White House on the design of
this obsolete and immoral policy are proven and well-known allies of
Bush, it would seem as if the unfortunate harangue of Oct. 24 was
written by some bitter enemy of the president, for the purpose of
making him the subject of colossal ridicule in the eyes of the United
States and the world.

To
recapitulate about the fallacious and hypocritical nature of the
presidential allegations could be a tiring and painful mental
exercise, both for the reader and the writer. However, because the
ugly rhetoric comes from someone like Bush, it is impossible to
ignore it. Certain clarifications are needed.

Wouldn’t
you call brazen hypocrisy Bush’s comments about his desire to give
Cubans on the island the freedom of contacts or alternatives to put
an end with their purported isolation, when he, at the same time, is
most responsible for that isolation, when he bars Cuban-Americans in
the United States from visiting their relatives on the island?

In
June 2004, this president implemented cruel travel restrictions
against the Cuban family on both shores of the Straits of Florida.
Among other limitations, the inhumane measures deny Cuban-Americans a
right as basic and sacred as attending the funeral of parents in
Cuba. And the guilty party (read: George W. Bush) has the nerve to
pass himself off as a paladin of human rights and freedom of
contact.

Is the
president not an ignoramus and a hypocrite when he asks for the
cooperation of the community of nations to promote a U.S.-style
democracy in Cuba? What kind of blindness afflicts George W.? He
seems to be unaware that the same community of nations inflicts a
humiliating defeat on him, year after year, at the United Nations,
when it votes almost unanimously to lift the embargo that weighs on
the Cuban people.

If the
president truly wants to find a consensus with the rest of the world
with regard to the island, he should begin by bowing to the will of
most of the world’s nations and lift, once and for all, the blockade
against Cuba. For sure, in such an instance the peoples of the earth
would support President Bush and it would be a support for which the
White House would not need to engage in bribery, threats or
blackmail.

Is it
not irresponsible for Bush to advocate explosive changes in Cuba, to
demand a "transition" where the priority is not the
people’s stability and well-being but the collapse of the Cuban
society and its institutions, as well as the reign of chaos on the
island? Is the president perhaps suggesting a prescription for Cuba
similar to the one he used in Iraq, with the result of half a million
dead and three million refugees?

I must
admit, however, that amid such nonsense there is one true statement.
Bush is right when he says that Cubans on the island and abroad are
impatiently awaiting the transition. Not the transition that will not
occur in Cuba, I must
clarify, which would not be approved by Cubans, but the transition
that will inexorably occur in the United States in November 2008,
after the presidential election.

In this,
the most necessary transition, we shall — once and for all –send
George W. Bush back to his ranch in Texas, from which he never should
have emerged.