Cubans

The Cuban exile community should ask the patriot Mari Bras for forgiveness. It should ask the people of Puerto Rico.

By Mayra Montero

(Editor’s Note: It is sad to think that some of the criminals involved in Mari Bras’ son’s assassination walk freely and enjoy the good life in Miami today.)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Now that the FBI is declassifying files that show that, as the world more or less knew, in the mid-1970s assassinations were plotted in Puerto Rico as easily as making corn fritters, we should look back and reflect on the reasons terrorism began to spread. One, the people accepted it in silence; two, cold-blooded assassinations were carried out for political motives.

People were killed here not once but several times. And the plan was to continue to kill, as we saw in the case of Juan Mari Bras.*

Why did a group of frenzied Cubans who were not serious oppositionists or sensible people with historical perspective or formal education but unscrupulous fanatics settle in Puerto Rico, threaten with death anyone they wished and meet in a downtown restaurant to decide who they would threaten by phone, whose car tires they would slash, or, if he was within range, whose head they would blow off?

Today, it would be unthinkable that a foul little paper such as the weekly La Crónica could openly threaten people, publish their names and warn them that they would get their comeuppance.

Why didn’t the courts or the police ever intervene? Because they were part of the plot. There have always been corrupt cops, in every police department in every part of the world.

Today’s corrupt cops, who make money protecting the goons and the drug dealers, were the corrupt cops of that period. Because there were not as many goons or drug dealers, they received money from those troglodytes to look the other way, harass and collaborate in the defenestration of journalists, artists, intellectuals or ordinary people who favored independence.

Today, looking back without anger, or with one’s anger controlled and placed in its historic place, we must admit that if the culprits were the police, those who directed the police at that time and later turned out to be gangsters; if the culprits were some legislators who protected those people and who are now discredited, in the shadows or in prison; if the culprits were the FBI and the intelligence system that nourished those activities, then the culprits were also the press and the decent exile community, which numbered in the thousands. Culprits were all those who kept silent.

Undoubtedly, there was a majority of Cubans in Puerto Rico who looked with reluctance, horror and disgust upon the writings in La Crónica or upon the barbarities those people promised from the table where they ate, pork fat dripping from their lips, people who spoke only about running over, ripping apart, knocking off the heads of others. They didn’t hide and weren’t subtle. They enjoyed total impunity. Given by the police, of course, and by others.

When they phoned a Puerto Rican newspaper like El Mundo (I can vouch for that) to threaten a reporter with death or to invite to him to walk to the parking lot because his car was on fire, when they engaged in psychological warfare, what did the newspapers do? What did they publish about it?

It got to the point that it was possible that the same men who had phoned in their threats would go into El Mundo’s newsroom (with the excuse they were bringing a message) and boast about themselves to the same reporters they had threatened days earlier.

They were boastful individuals, vulgar goons who could swing from one side to the other. But their essence always was intolerance, violence, intimidation. And there’s another crucial detail: it it’s wrong to be like that in one’s own country, it’s even worse to be like that in the country that welcomes you as a refugee.

The press kept silent. The decent exiles looked away, mostly because they were afraid. And during the mid-1970s, from 1973 until the murders on Maravilla Hill and a little beyond, Puerto Rico was a smaller version of Pinochet’s Chile or the Military Junta’s Argentina. Those realities must be rescued and documented.

Like the Catholic Church, which after some years asked for forgiveness, as an institution, for its errors and complicities, the Cuban exile community here should ask Mari Bras, a patriot, for forgiveness. It should apologize to the people of Puerto Rico. Not everyone was at fault and not everyone is the same today, but Cubans carry that stain. Let us begin by acknowledging it.

A poem by Cuban Nicolás Guillén summarizes this wonderfully: “In the end, I remember everything, and because I remember everything, what the devil do you want me to do? Besides, ask them. I’m sure they also remember.”

Mayra Montero is a writer, book author and columnist for the Sunday magazine La Revista del Nuevo Día in Puerto Rico.

* Juan Mari Bras – then leader of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party who was running for governor – is still alive today, but his 23-year-old son Santiago “Chagui” Mari Pesquera was murdered March 24, 1976, in an apparent offshoot of Mari Bras’ planned political assassination by right-wing Cuban dissidents.