The message on the billboard
By Varela
The billboard erected in Miami featuring The Cuban Five lasted as long as a cookie outside a school: 24 hours.
Quite an achievement.
If it had been installed back in the 1970s, the workers putting it up would have been blown up by a bomb.
This shows two things:
1. That Miami is not yet an impartial site. Therefore, the trial of The Five was vitiated and should be voided.
3. That, in the modern world, fewer and fewer impartial venues remain for cases like that one.
Let me explain.
Go to the Miami neighborhood of Liberty City, with 50,000 African-Americans, per the latest census. (Of course, they live in crowded conditions, they don’t have the comfortable population density of Key Biscayne, which holds 10,000 within the same area.)
Exercising your right of free speech – per the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – put up a sign calling for the release of a member of the KKK who was arrested in Pensacola for running a red light.
Someone will put a match to the sign on the very first night.
Or go to Miami Beach, with a Jewish population of thousands, and erect a sign near the monument to the Holocaust victims, asking for the release of a skinhead arrested because his German shepherd bit a rabbi.
That sign won’t last until nightfall, not because the Semites are better pyrotechnicians than the African-Americans but because they have more power.
The same happens in every ethnic barrio or neighborhood with a social minority.
You can’t mock Bruce Lee in Los Angeles’ Chinatown or mess with Harvey Milk’s image in the Castro district of San Francisco.
And the same would happen in Havana if someone wrote a graffiti on a wall along the Malecón, asking for Posada Carriles to emerge unscathed from his trial. It is a provocation, not only to the people of Cuba but also to the relatives of the people killed in the bombing of the Barbados plane.
Posada Carriles is an S.O.B. to the nth degree, and a murderer too, but if we’re going to talk about rights, everything becomes cold and generic: everybody has the same rights.
The Cuban Five, condemned by the euphemisms applied to their antiterrorist struggle against the Miami rabble, paid the price for being tried in a hostile environment by a biased court intimidated by the local press and politicians.
It’s not even worthwhile to mention their sentences: they’re not valid. They were handed down to placate the irascibles. The Five did not enjoy the benefits of justice, only the prejudices.
Seen thus, I think that the effectiveness of the billboard was not in creating a state of opinion in favor of anybody’s release or in demonstrating the intolerance of the Miami Cuban-Rightwingers (which is more than just evident) but in demonstrating their lack of humor.
If you look at the photograph, the billboard was placed next to one from Geico Insurance that says “Save money.” If The Cuban Five are released right now, the taxpayer will be saving money.
A more practical and logical suggestion has never before been given to the intolerant exiles, regarding a political case and in times of economic crisis.
But these right-wing exiles are so clumsy and hard-headed that they would rather continue paying for the clothing, food, electricity and medical attention given to The Cuban Five in prison than to see them released so they can return to their homeland.
More than totalitarian and archaic, that kind of thinking is antimercantilist – if we look at it from a capitalist standpoint.
