Alejandro’s dilemma

By Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera

From Rebelión

I would like to start with the shame, because Alejandro Ríos affirms* that I haven’t a bit of it when I say that Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Carlos Varela, Santiago Feliú and I wrote (or stated in interviews) that the Cuban dissidents who did not commit violent acts should be freed.

Where do we lack shame, not a bit of it? Is it because we did not exalt the death of Orlando Zapata or Guillermo Fariñas’ hunger strike or the walks of the prisoners’ relatives, the Ladies in White?

Alejandro Ríos should bear in mind that that petition is being raised by intellectuals who do not share the ideas of those prisoners. We do not take credit for the liberation of those inmates, not at all, but Ríos is incapable of seeing any merit in any other effort for their release. He isn’t capable of even mentioning Cardinal Ortega and Spanish Foreign Minister Moratinos, as if it were unholy to secure that release from “outside” the dissident community.

If Alejandro Ríos, Duanel Díaz and Raúl Rivero, to name only three radical ideologists who oppose the Cuban Revolution, requested the release of Gerardo Hernández, Tony Guerrero, René González, Ramón Labañino and Fernando González, who merely informed the Cuban government about the activities of terrorist groups in Miami, they could be absolutely sure that I won’t ask them to first praise the many people in the world who have asked for their liberation, or exalt their wives and children, who in the past decade have not received a U.S. visa to visit them in prison.

If they had the decency to request their release, it would be (to me) the generous attitude of three adversaries.

But Alejandro Ríos doesn’t even care about the freedom of inmates on his side.

For 52 people to be pardoned seems to him something that only interests “a circle of cognoscenti” and “the aggrieved relatives.” Doesn’t it interest him? I would be delighted if the government in Washington freed those Cuban young people sentenced to absurd terms only for informing about conspiratorial activities that the FBI should have squelched, not supported. Would that be a reason to praise the government of Barack Obama? Sure, if he releases them, he deserves the praise, I think, and I won’t refuse to praise him.

Alejandro Ríos, a mutant if there ever was one, was a combative journalist in Juventud Rebelde, the official organ of the Cuban Union of Young Communists. That was in the 1980s, when he was my student at the University of Havana’s School of Arts and Letters. He, who leaped from the Havana communist daily to El Nuevo Herald in Miami, can hardly talk about my metamorphosis, when I live in the same country where I was born, have worked in the same place for 40 years and think very much the same thoughts I had 50 years ago.

I would like to tell him that the same young man who wrote The Red Book in what he calls my “early youth” says that Duanel Díaz lies when he says Jorge Mañach’s house was broken into and his library turned to pulp. Or when he says the Cuban government prevented Agustín Acosta from reuniting with the daughter who lived in Miami.

The same professor who taught literature to Alejandro 30 years ago is the one who reminds Emilio Ichikawa that “enlightened despotism” is only one of the possibilities seen by the illuminati to change European life. That the Enlightenment included not only Voltaire, friend of Frederic II of Prussia, but also Montesquieu, who wrote The Spirit of the Laws, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract.

If today I am enthused by some (not all) Cuban cultural projects, A.R. can be sure that what changed were the projects, not I.

What I think is that many ideologists in Planet Miami should opt to find points of understanding with the Cuban reality, even while remaining adversaries of the Revolution. Engaging in a permanent “demonization” of Cuba is something that has been done for many years and has not led to anything good, healthy, useful or intelligent.

It leads, for example, to the fact that Alejandro Ríos has no idea of what to do and, as a kind of reverse Fariñas, is almost ready to stage a hunger strike until the Cuban police puts back in prison the inmates who were freed.

* “Retazos,” Alejandro Ríos, El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Aug. 16, 2010. http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2010/08/14/782816/alejandro-rios-retazos.html