Exchanges and opportunisms
By Alejandro Armengol
From El Nuevo Herald
It is impossible for me to arrange for Willy Chirino to give a concert in Havana. Nor can I arrange for someone on the island to stage a well-deserved tribute to Celia Cruz, which is still pending. Bebo Valdés – what more could I want – did not receive in Cuba the honors he deserves. Nor did Guillermo Cabrera Infante and many others.
I pause, lest this turns into a rosary of debts.
Now then, should I turn my complaints into an inventory of omissions and criticism accumulated in the United States against the writers and artists living in Cuba who have at some point expressed themselves in favor of the Havana regime?
If the government of President Barack Obama allowed Cuban artists living on the island – those who for nearly a decade were not allowed to travel to the United States – to visit this country, should my first reaction be to become a censor or Customs agent and demand a tit-for-tat exchange, as if they were merely prisoners or slaves?
From the outset, I must clarify that I do not think my opinion has any influence in Cuba. When I left, I gave up – voluntarily or because I had no choice – a series of rights and duties. When I adopted U.S. citizenship, that list was expanded considerably. It is in the U.S. where I think – perhaps too hopefully – that my opinion has greater weight.
According to the rules of this country, I think that any American citizen has the right to travel to Cuba as a tourist, not because he’d be considered a champion of democracy, but because of his rights as a citizen. The rest is barrio politics, the votes of legislators obtained through campaign contributions and the lack of interest in tourism on a Caribbean island.
At the same time, I think the United States should allow visits by artists, writers and academics from the island without demanding reciprocity in return. It’s up to the universities and other academic centers in this country to assume the responsibility and travel expenses. The rest – bringing up old scores or wondering why this one and not that one – is up to the last-minute grudge holders or, even worse, to the street-corner opportunists who are always willing to make comparisons.
How long will we hear in this city the same argument of the easy comparison with the regime in Havana? If Cuba censors, why should we not do the same? If Miami singers cannot perform on the Plaza de la Revolución, should we allow Cuban singers to walk around the streets of Miami?
Well, yes. For a very simple reason: we who live in this city are fed up with censors and do not want any more. If you don’t like cultural exchanges to be one-way only, you have every right to express your opinion. But if at the same time, because of the same limitation, you want to suppress it or take the side of the censors, well, you just don’t understand what it means to live in a democracy. Or, what is worse, for economic expediency you side with those who act just like your alleged enemies.
Those who take the view that it is the taxpayers’ money and suddenly wrap themselves with the flag of the public treasury, allegedly to ensure that not a single dollar is spent on the performances of those coming from Cuba, are usually dissemblers or ignorants, more interested in undermining a policy than in knowing it. Hypocrites and scoundrels, in most cases, they confine themselves to plucking a string that in Miami always finds resonance.
The list of hypocrites has a special place for those who, under the cover of anti-Castro orthodoxy, look for quick notoriety, hoping to erase a past in which they received the most varied privileges from the government in Havana, from study abroad to providential scholarships.
They are the ones who took advantage of a special status that allowed them to leave the island one day, without having to worry about the acts of repudiation, ostracism or humiliation that have always preceded the final departure from the country.
These diaspora patriots who only needed to get on a plane, land at any destination and declare themselves members of the anti-Castro Taliban, howl every day against any rapprochement with anyone living on the island.
With a frequency that defies time and sanity, a motive or an argument is fabricated among Cuban exiles that enables certain instigators of public opinion to justify their cultural and political incompetence with new calls to persecution and insult. They do not deserve the title of intransigents, because their intransigence is pliable. They are merchants of intolerance, not true intolerants.
They engage in witch-hunting, protected by the immaturity and frustration spawned by an exile that has lasted too long, and by the illusion of power that a microphone, a newspaper or a simple letter gives. In essence, they’re nothing but ghetto inquisitors engaged in crusades in which they demand apologies, regrets and retractions, looking for the sins of others so they can forget their own.
