Cuba, through deceptive glasses

By Luis Sexto

The situation in Cuba was seen yesterday, and is seen today, through glasses of different colors. And that seems natural when, perhaps despite the wishes of the rulers, a storm of recriminations, threats, exigencies, and conditions falls on the Cuban archipelago, staking out diverse positions of a political nature.

The saying that “everything takes on the color of the glass through which it’s viewed” becomes, then, a multiple set of optics. Each observer claims that his viewpoint is correct.

Can truth have so many faces, can it be so chameleon-like that everyone who claims to be right is right? Let’s not argue about that. But let’s be specific.

The march of the so-called Ladies in White on Sunday, May 2, (and presumably the following Sundays, according to Cardinal Jaime Ortega) without being booed or harassed, has been judged as “a victory” by those ladies who engage in pilgrimages, asking for the release of their sons or husbands, who violated the laws that protect the safety of the republic.

Some say that the Cuban government has given in, that it has made a concession at the request of the Roman Catholic Church. It seems clear. That’s the blue color of the most common vision, the most benign, most idyllic color. But it is also the most out-of-focus. Do the people who view it that way realize that their conclusion could worsen the situation of everyone involved, rather than improve it?

I don’t doubt that in certain secret offices in the United States, or in some building or chalet or table under a tent in Coconut Grove, Miami, people are pumping up the idea that the fact that Raúl Castro’s government authorized a peaceful march is the result of pressure from the outside and the inside, both linked.

So, I shall try to be as objective as possible on a topic on which few others achieve objectivity. Passion and interests relegate us to the extremes. Therefore, I shouldn’t have to demand so much balance from myself in the defense of ideas or political parties, because the people on the other side of the wall regularly hurl insults, slander and aberrations in this direction. If I can be proud of one virtue in my journalistic career, it is of trying to maintain balance, refusing to look through the glass that is most convenient for me.

That said, I wonder if those who presume to have scored a triumph at the expense of the Cuban government’s weakness are aware that in politics, as José Martí warned, reality is what is not seen at first glance. My perception, consistent with Martí’s opinion, is the opposite.

Notice that the government and the Communist Party are least interested in demonstrating weakness. The history of the past 50 years – and the CIA and State Department analysts would see this clearly if they put down the glasses of arrogance – confirms that Cuban revolutionaries have refused, as a strategic rule, to display any sign of weakness.

Few people have been so protective of their dignity and so desirous that no gesture, no word of theirs should suggest weakness, fear or opportunism as the Cuban revolutionaries. Back in the Sierra Maestra, when Fidel Castro formed the second guerrilla column, he gave it a lot more credit than it deserved in the succession.

And although some sharp-eyed reader may think that I’m contradicting myself, let me clarify that, in order to appear to be strong, though you may be weak, you have to have forces, at least intelligence forces. Two years later, the smaller and slippery guerrilla army won the war. In the same manner, the Cuban Revolution, despite its insufficiencies and the external hostilities, has remained upstanding.

Well, as I see it, the government’s decision to authorize the march of the Ladies in White, as well as Ortega’s announcement of that decision in the Church of Santa Rita on Fifth Avenue, are not an act of weakness but quite the opposite – even if my opinion sounds dissonant, impossible, subjective or false to some readers of the El Nuevo Herald or El País.

The decision is, instead, a manifestation of fortitude, inscribed in a constructive strategy without a last-minute profile, a program of socialist actualization. If the beneficiaries of this sort of aperture consider that the gesture could be seen as an opportunity to ratchet up the destabilizing offensive from within, they run the risk of a setback, in my opinion.

Let’s assume that a panorama must be safe from the chromaticity of the glasses used to watch, judge and combat Cuba’s society and its government. The Cuba that lives, works, suffers and sometimes despairs has no ties to the exiles in Miami or Madrid.

To the émigrés, yes. Because, although both belligerent parties put them in the same bag for a while, there is a substantial difference between he who emigrates and he who exiles himself. Some time ago, Gregorio Marañón dealt with this dichotomy in an essay that is still applicable.

The exile insists on returning and imposing his party, his ideas, his properties. The average émigré doesn’t. That is why Cuba does not need the exiles to improve itself.

But the exiles do need the Cubans inside the island to reestablish – with the aid of the power that conserves them and reproduces them in test-tubes – their economic and political domination. And in that hypothetical moment, they may find it very difficult to count on the honest majority within, without whose help they’ll never be able to return.

Although returning seems more like a smoke curtain. Too much money has enriched the exiles for them to dampen the horn of plenty in a phony patriotic display. One time, Frank Calzón told one of my friends (whose name I won’t reveal for ethical reasons) that what he did as a politician was not intended to overthrow Fidel Castro. That wasn’t the reason.

So what’s the reason, Mr. Calzón, this commentator asks. The question is rhetorical; the answer is obvious. The idea is to continue to look at Cuba from afar through astigmatic lenses to see if someone on the island slips and continues to defy reason. As a consequence, the federal funds for subversion in Cuba keep growing.

Therefore, there is no one more interested in the war and its distorted images than those who benefit from it.

Luis Sexto, Cuban journalist and winner of the José Martí Journalism Award for 2009, writes a regular column in the newspaper Juventud Rebelde. He is now a regular contributor to Progreso Semanal/Weekly.