A letter that encourages and irritates
By Alejandro Armengol
From El Nuevo Herald
Seventy-four dissidents have come out against the island’s isolation by signing a letter to the U.S. Congress in which they support a bill to lift the travel ban on Americans to Cuba. Predictably, the document has aroused the ire of the most reactionary sector of Miami’s exile community.
The problem with these irritated exiles is not just that they’re losing support and representation both in Washington and Havana, but also that they’re losing their heroes. At the end, they will only be able to cling to Luis Posada Carriles, who many in this city brand as a terrorist.
Their ideal is to have a monopoly on their opponents’ thoughts. They live in a world where history is mistaken for geography; they never keep at hand a map of the island, which would remind them that they live in another country where they’re a part but not the whole. This arrested time may fill them with hope – from a personal point of view – but it contributes to the fact that their vision of Cuba is valid barely in two or three coffee shops on Calle Ocho.
We can understand that the fact that the letter contains the signatures of some of the dissidents who have been mentioned the most in Miami in recent months – from Guillermo Fariñas to Yoani Sánchez – causes them disappointment. But this emotional reaction, which is very understandable, does not fully explain that frustration.
Beyond a valid disagreement with the points of view that this group of Cuban oppositionists have regarding a bill before the U.S. Congress, we see how some Internet sites have focused on and manipulated the topic. In this sense, the blogs “Capitol Hill Cubans” and “Babalú Blog” attack the letter because, among other reasons, they consider that it was not drafted by the dissidents, to whom they deny any possibility to know in detail what’s being debated in Washington about Cuba policy.
“This letter was the initiative of U.S.-based organizations, the Cuba Study Group and the so-called Center for Democracy in the Americas, which lobby against sanctions,” Capitol Hill Cubans says.
Almost in the same words, Babalú Blog comments that “it is obvious that the dissidents themselves did not write it. With little access to news or the ability to research American law, there is very little probability that they would know the actual name of the law being considered in Congress, let alone its number, without someone on the outside providing it to them.”
In the first place, I should make it clear that Capital Hill Cubans is edited by Mauricio Claver-Carone, a member of the board of directors of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC that lobbies in favor of keeping the restrictions and the embargo against Cuba.
In this sense, unless the blog’s author believes, in the purest Stalinist sense, that there are “good lobbyists” and “bad lobbyists” – and then we’d be looking at another example of mistaking history for geography, more appropriate to Moscow during the first half of the 20th Century – it is not significant that those in the United States who favor a change in the regulations of the embargo also favor (or even sponsor) the measure. That’s politics in the United States, like it or not.
What’s most significant, however, is that the criterion adopted to criticize the document and its signatories is similar to the criterion used by the regime in Havana, which apparently these irritated exiles oppose.
The above-cited blogs practically brand the dissidents who sign the document as marionettes, as puppets that move at the will of someone in the United States.
While Capitol Hill Cubans and Babalú Blog do not describe the oppositionists as mercenaries – the argument used by the Cuban government to sentence a good many of the peaceful oppositionists now imprisoned on the island – that’s precisely what another Internet site (which never stints on insults) does.
“This is a letter from lifelong turncoats,” writes Zoé Valdés in her blog. Elsewhere, she says that “to be a dissident in Cuba – like these people, who charge for being dissidents and set up a business – is beginning to be a career.” It is odd that the Paris-based writer has nothing better to wield than the same argument published daily by Havana. It seems that the lessons learned at the right and left sides of Alfredo Guevara are not easily forgotten.
The tendency toward totalitarianism, the interest in annulling any contrary opinion, the inability to accept other people’s opinions is not a gratuitous exercise. Those who block the path of anyone who departs from the anti-Havana strategy drawn by Miami’s ultra-right – especially by the Republican Cuban-American legislators – maintain affinities that go beyond ideology and are linked to economic interests.
In some cases, those interests are in accord with the standards this country has set for nonprofit groups and institutions. In others, revelations have emerged of mismanagement and improper use.
To cling to obsolete forms of confrontation with Castroism is to persist in defeat – except for those who have turned misfortune into a business.
