The Cuban-American hard-line bravado banishes into thin air
“Left out of the conversation,” read the Miami Herald headline.
Gloating is a base emotion but one entirely called for in this instance. They ignored us, our Cuban-American members of Congress. For decades, those of us in the Cuban community who traveled to Washington to try to get them to have a conscience, see reason, understand what they were doing to the Cuban people ran into a stone wall.
They humiliated us by sending the most junior staff to meet with us. They called press conferences to vilify us, to red-bait us. Back home they tried to intimidate us. They retaliated. Not openly but effectively. Some pressured our employers, made us lose jobs, careers. They were fanatical and ferocious.
In my case I ended up having to leave Miami to get a job. Lucrative but lonely, and not what I wanted to do either. I fell into a profound and prolonged disabling depression. Stage 4+, if depression were measured like cancer. My family, medicines, Miami, the sun and the water, eventually healed me. I feel stronger than ever.
If I am happy with the Herald headlines, it’s not out bitterness. I have a hard time holding on to grudges. The main reason is that that sorry bunch, the Cuban Mafia, Havana calls them, the Cuban Con Artists, I call them, because everything they sold as solid, their vaunted power especially, suddenly vanished into thin air. Happy because they no longer can automatically veto change. Happy because they can no longer dictate a policy based on allowing the Cuban people to go blind in order to try to poke out the eye of Fidel or Raul.
Left out of the conversation? No. They never wanted to have a conversation. Not with us, not with anyone who failed to toe the hard line. Our way. The highway. That’s who they were. And still are.
Had they been invited to join, they would have moved heaven and earth to make sure the conversation never happened. Not just the one between Cuba and the United States, but that one especially. They didn’t want any conversation in which the insanity and the inanity of U.S. policy toward Cuba could be brought into the light to be fully understood and repudiated by the American people. Now their worst fears have come to pass. Americans are repudiating the old, failed, cruel policy every day by flocking to Cuba.
It is, finally, all real. Sanity won. Kindness won. Reason won. We won. They—bitterness, vengeance—lost.
Most of all, I am happy because of what I read in the sub-headlines to the main story, especially the last one.
“The Cuban-American politicians have been left out.”
“They were not involved in President’s Obama Cuba policy.”
“The group faces the prospect of four years of the same.”
