Cuba, fable and fabulists

By Weekly Archive On Apr 15, 2009

Those
who see a dilution in the era or environment they once lorded and in
which they were happy tend to turn them into fables. It happened with
the Middle Ages, that huge church (according to Leon Bloy) or that
paradise of errant knights (according to the novels of chivalry).

I
must admit it: this concept is not mine. It was formulated by Jean
Cassou in his electrifying essay "Cervantes, a man, an epoch."
And I use it because in Miami and some other similar places the Cuba
prior to 1959 is packaged in the gift wrap of a nice fable where the
strong men, like Batista and Machado, seem to be apprentices of
neighborhood cops, or where the corruption of generals, doctors and
bosses in executive posts is an inconsequential prank. Because, in
the end, the past was always better than the present.

I
would not want to commit the sin I pin on others. In other words, I
don’t describe as hellish that Cuba of dependent capitalism I
inhabited until the age of 13 — that is, until Dec. 31, 1958 —
which I have found in old documents and books. To encapsulate it in
an unrelieved vision would be the equivalent of turning it into a
fable, too, but as a receptacle for all vices.

That
republic built cultural values. Preserved traditions. And incubated
the ferment of revolution and progress. But I’m not ready to accept
the theory of Paradise Lost. Otherwise, I would forget my father,
ready to kill himself because Batista’s buyouts (at the
recommendation of the American Truslow) displaced him from the sugar
mill where he worked for 20 years and deprived him of his only sure
compensation: steady work, which he finally regained under the
Revolution.

Or
I might not have read that 1957 pamphlet from the University Catholic
Group (ACU) titled "Why an agrarian reform," where young
men who later landed in Florida to live with Batista’s fugitives
illustrated (through a survey) the abject living conditions of the
rural population — at the time 34 percent of all the workers on the
island — whose principal demand was to be allowed to work the land,
land that was almost entirely someone else’s.

But
those macabre details, minutely confirmed by the 1953 census, are not
the subject of this article. Rather, I want to emphasize that, in
today’s Cuba and in its relations with the United States, judgments
and predictions are made from the fabled country nurtured by the
media in Miami or Madrid. Those judgments overlook history.

From
those fables, certain lines evoke as a historic privilege Cuba’s
relations with the United States, where political and economic
dependence was "alliance" and the exploitation of the U.S.
companies was "generosity." The magazine Bohemia — despite
its nationalistic hues and the fact it was the pot that brewed part
of Cuba’s liberating thought in the central decades of the 20th
Century — remarked in an interview with Ambassador Gardner in the
mid-1950s: "No Cuban ever enters the United States Embassy
without leaving with something good for Cuba." The fable of a
happy Cuba is also articulated with these perceptions, of course.

People
forget history to such an extent that they don’t remember that the
United States, as an expansionist scheme first and neocolonialism
second, did not treat Cuba correctly and cleanly. They forget
Washington’s military intervention in 1989; all of its later and
conditioned generosity to the island was a ripe fruit that some
Cubans still hunger for.

To
learn more, you need to dig through the archives of the United Fruit
Company and read the letters and communications of Rafael
Díaz-Balart, one of that big American company’s best known
attorneys. In those documents, the grandfather of the dynasty that
attempts to monopolize Cuba’s "freedom" from Miami
recommended to his Yankee bosses how to get around the precepts of
the newly passed Constitution of 1940, which — among other articles
that carried forward the Mambí ideas of 1895 — banned the
latifundio
[huge
land tracts].

Words
can mean little in the face of facts. And I review those facts so I
can opine about the outlook created by Obama’s election as president
and the demands voiced by Cubanologists and "Cubaphagists"
to Cuba (and not only the Cuban government), urging it to make a
gesture, to take the first step in a dialogue.

And
when the people on the island respond with a willingness to talk, in
sovereign and equal discourse, and when they say that the first step
is up to the aggressor who created the conflict, certain people
beyond the Straits and their followers inside Cuba shake their heads
as if to say: "How stubborn is this communist regime. It wants
only to perpetuate itself and mock the good faith of the democracies,
to give more of the same."

But
really, can expectations be encouraged — at least among the Cubans
who wish to avoid a dependence that we know to be historically
antinational — about the purposes of the new government presided by
Barack Obama? This is not a rhetorical question; it’s bleeding
concern. Let me respond, as I did on Dec. 27, 2008, in an e-mail to
Flavia Marreiro of the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.

By
himself, Obama represents a change in the United States. So, the
fundamental expectation should come from the American people.
Generally speaking, Cubans figure that an Afro-American politician
risen to the presidency of the most powerful country on the planet —
because he belongs to an ethnic group that was discriminated against
and plundered for so many years — would have to favor fair and
respectful relations with Cuba. He would have to eliminate the
blockade and its network of laws that restrict Cuban economy and
trade, laws created as formulas to overthrow Fidel Castro’s
revolution. When one considers how old and perverse this policy is,
no analysis of the Cuban situation can exclude the influence of the
U.S. governments on Cuba and Cuba’s current problems.

Now
then, a man, a liberal team in the United States, where power is like
the seed of an almond tree, is deeply implanted in the system, does
not represent any guarantee of change in the imperialist nature of
the United States. Like Kennedy or Carter, Obama may be an
intelligent, cultured, charismatic man, even infused with a humanist
ethos, but those features don’t mean that he is not a man of the
system.

How
far can Obama go against the interests of the system? We have to see
how strong the counter-revolutionary lobby is, and how far the United
States needs to go to readjust its space in the world. Maybe, at the
end, Obama and his administration can sit down to talk, without
arrogance, with the Cuban government and begin to indemnify Cuba for
the damages caused in 50 years of war — secret and public, cold and
hot.

That’s
what I said three months ago. Today, from the viewpoint of the Cuban
and the journalist that I am, I admit that that possibility may
sometime be justified if sanity prevails. However, the so-called
exile is opposed to it, I believe, for two main reasons:

Those
who have profited and have amassed fortunes and minifortunes with
the magic lamp called "federal funds for subversion in Cuba"
refuse to lose their Magic Kingdom, which is up north, not the
besieged island in the Caribbean.
Because
those people hope to reconvert the country of revolution into the
fabled country into which they have poured their nostalgia for the
days when they lorded the island and were happy at the expense of —
in today’s sociopolitical language — "the many."

In
turn, the revolutionaries — more committed and creative, immune to
bureaucratic contamination — want transformations that create a
country internally better able to generate well-being and to perfect
the various freedoms. I sense that they — and I — can tell the
difference between the counter-revolutionary fable of a better Cuba,
copied from the pre-1959 Cuba, and the Cuba we still dream about with
a feeling of disconformity.

The
most lucid Cuban thinker refuses to accept that the only valid model
of freedom and democracy is the one being touted from Miami and
Washington. The marketing of the fable is more of the same, expressed
in the worn-out rhetoric of the patriarchal bullies in an exile
community that stinks of comfort and fraud — with apologies to those
who are honestly convinced of the opposite.

Luis
Sexto, a Cuban journalist and the winner of the 2009 José Martí
journalism award, writes every Friday in the newspaper Juventud
Rebelde. He is a regular contributor to Progreso Weekly/Progreso
Semanal.