The Miami virus
By Varela
The clumsy but monetarily costly cyberoffensive against Cuba with bloggers is a reflex of the very journalism practiced in Miami. To understand why a Wilfredo Cancio Isla, an exile who’s an expert in Cuban news, disguises as a dissident a newly arrived derelict rocker named Gorki Aguila, one has to know that the ideology of exiledom is artificially spawned, breast-fed and talcuumed like an opposition-staged parade.
That conga line, its face toward capitalism, dances behind two parade marshals. One is the anti-Castro industry, present in every facet of daily activities; the other defines the compulsive daily consumption and the vital needs. There are moments when both leading “rumberos” maintain symbiosis, but eventually one of them always devours the other, through market phagocytosis.
That is why we see political emoticons and administrators of freedom. An unemployed Saavedra smashes CDs and an opulent Díaz-Balart flails at communism. An Emilio Ichikawa dully analyzes the drunkard Pánfilo in the Oscar Haza show; an Andrés Reynaldo disinforms locally, as chief of information in El Nuevo Herald (although all of them act with the same ignorance, opportunism, and social contempt and use similar, rudimentary language to communicate their arguments.)
That a man like Montaner (the one who’s visible, not the one who disappeared because of problems with Medicaid-Medicare, who is his brother) can sell himself on radio and television as the ideologue of the local right, in the hopes of becoming Cuba’s president, says it all.
The political base of our eponymous reactionaries is so simplistic that it is based on the book “Eudocio Ravines’ Great Swindle,” which everybody quotes and everybody keeps on their night table, I believe. That may be the reason for their poor dialectical resources.
The paraders, with Ninoska’s shrieks and Pérez-Roura’s droning on the radio, drive their entrepreneurial float with merchants with a pencil on an ear and a sign that says “No credit.” The Cosa Nostra rolls behind, like a casino wheel, because of what it calls self-protection.
Everybody plows ahead with a foot in jail and the other in City Hall. They govern the city in an environment of euphoric extortion, where the peddling of influences scratches the South American coast and the Iberian peninsula. Mayors and commissioners succeed each other (wearing the suits of executives or the uniforms of prison inmates, depending on whether the federal authorities catch up with them) and convince the neighborhood that it sleeps protected from taxes and economic crises.
But the payments of taxpayers flow into their bank accounts and from there to their campaigns, looking for ways to multiply, mutate and perpetuate, like every other virus. And now they’ve infiltrated the Internet.
José Varela, born in Cuba in 1955, was an editorial cartoonist in Miami for 15 years, at Éxito magazine (1991-97) and El Nuevo Herald (1993-2006). He is a publicist and television writer, as well as a member of the Progreso Weekly/Semanal team.
