Juanes and Miamian bullying
By René Vázquez Díaz
From Rebelión, Aug. 30, 2009
The insults aimed at Juanes for announcing he’ll sing a concert in Cuba address issues of principle that must be clarified. All efforts made to promote peace have only one victor: the ordinary Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits.
For the past half century, Cuba has been the victim of a war of economic and financial aggression. It is hypocritical, at this time, to claim that “Cuba is a dictatorship” in order to justify that aggression. There is no commercial or financial war against China or Vietnam, countries whose systems are similar to Cuba’s. No blockades have been imposed against Egypt of Saudi Arabia, veritable satrapies without any human rights.
A perfunctory research of Cuban-American businessmen’s relations with China would show that Miami adores communism. Their adoptive country is considerably dependent from the Communist Party of China.
Cuban Miami has a dangerous tradition of intimidation through threats, slander and physical aggression (not excluding murder) not only against anyone who shows sympathy toward Cuba and its people but also against anyone who defies the rules of frenzied anti-Castroism that characterizes the so-called “heroic exile.” Today, the object of that hostility is Juanes; but the history of bullying in Miami is long and dark.
For the purpose of collecting the most CIA money and remaining the top protagonists, the members of anti-Castro organizations in the 1970s killed each other with stunning impunity. Like today, each group claimed the most intransigent and valid anti-Cuban line. Like today, all other groups were the target of their attacks.
In October 1975, Batista goon Rolando Masferrer, who slandered all other exile leaders in his Miami-published newspaper, started his Ford Torino and was blown to pieces by a car bomb. In April 1976, while watching television in his Coral Gables residence, counter-revolutionary ringleader José Elías de la Torriente was shot four times and killed. Before that crime, other anti-Castro activists had threatened — among other barbarities — to hang him on Bayfront Park.
Another prominent exile, Ramón Donestévez, was assassinated after proclaiming that he favored a peaceful coexistence with the Revolution. Luciano Nieves, who was also in favor of dialogue with Cuba, was shot to death in the parking lot of a hospital where his son was being treated. Emilio Milián, an announcer at WQBA-AM publicly condemned the terrorist violence committed by exiles; in 1976, a car bomb took off his legs.
Between 1973 and 1976 alone, the FBI recorded 103 bomb blasts in Miami and investigated six political assassinations. “Cuban Miami is remarkably complacent about terrorism,” wrote David Rieff in his magnificent book “Going to Miami.” Relying on FBI documents, Edward S. Herman tells in his book “The Real Terror Network” how Cuban-origin counter-revolutionary groups in New York City were responsible for 20 bomb attacks between 1975 and 1980.
By fostering the U.S. policy of strangling the Cuban people, the hostile behavior of the Miami militant toward artists, intellectuals and entrepreneurs who have maintained professional or commercial contacts with Cuba is a particularly depraved form of fratricide.
During the 1980s, bombs exploded in the offices of several agencies that organized trips to Cuba or sent medicine or packages to the island. In 1979, a showing of the Cuban movie “Memories of Underdevelopment” was interrupted by gunshots. In 1988, a bomb exploded in the house of María Cristina Herrera, a peaceful Cuban researcher who studied U.S.-Cuba relations. The same happened to Griselda Hidalgo for advocating a lifting of the restrictions on travel to Cuba.
The Miami-based magazine Réplica, published by Max Lesnik, boasts a sad world record as the target of the most bomb attacks. In 1974, 1975 and 1981, bombs exploded in its editorial offices. In 1982, another device was found while still unexploded, but in 1994 two incendiary bombs did explode at the site.
When the Aragón Orchestra tried to play in Miami in 1996, the tour’s entrepreneur received threatening phone calls that forced him to cancel the performance of the extraordinary Cuban charangueros.
That same year, 200 Miami Cuban demonstrators physically attacked the public that arrived at a concert by the great pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. When the owner of the Centro Vasco Restaurant, a respectable establishment on Southwest Eighth Street, invited Havana resident Rosita Fornés to sing boleros, a bomb set the club on fire.
As Ann Louise Bardach tells in her well-documented book “Cuba Confidential,” none of the “exiled” artists who had performed at the MIDEM center raised their voices to condemn the bomb threat that interrupted a concert there by singer Compay Segundo. When Los Van Van performed at the Miami Arena in 1999, the frenzied protests culminated with one person injured and 11 people arrested.
Nelson Mandela was invited in 1990 to receive the key to the City of Miami, but while appearing in the “Nightline” TV program he expressed his deep appreciation of the victories of the Cuban internationalist soldiers against the racist army of South Africa and stressed the historic importance of Cuba for the African National Congress (ANC). An unprecedented wave of protests rose in the radio stations that terrorize Cubans in Florida and the ineffable Mandela was branded as a “marihuana-smoking nigger faggot.”
So, neither Juanes nor Miguel Bosé is alone. Now, the plan is to scare them. As David Rieff puts it, Miami is “the capital of an imaginary country.” The current “leaders” of that nonexistent country carry with them a criminal past that is evidenced in the aggressive attitude of those who hammer CDs and send death threats.
No spokesman or intellectual member of the exile community condemns bullying as a method to achieve the isolation of Cuba. They point a finger at Juanes and hate the incomparable Silvio Rodríguez but they don’t denounce those who are a mental and physical part of that community and have committed crimes against humanity.
Those who don’t take today’s threats seriously should bear in mind that the first attack on a civilian airliner, which killed everyone aboard, was committed in October 1976 by anti-Castro activists Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, who have been publicly hailed in Miami. None of the artists and intellectuals who criticize Juanes for taking his music and message of peace to Cuba has demanded that the culprits of the Barbados crime be extradited and tried for their bloody deeds.
Seen as “the good terrorists,” Posada Carriles and Bosch represent an insoluble moral dilemma, not only for the government of the United States, which harbors bloodthirsty and self-admitted terrorists, but also for Miami, which calls itself democratic but acts like a gangster.
Why that obsession to obstruct any type of constructive dialogue? Why that penchant for brutality? Because the bullies lack their own ideology, apart from the U.S., an ideology that might represent a real alternative to the Revolution. So, the only thing they can do is throw coal in a fire that is ever more artificial and noxious. It that fire ever goes out, the bullies would be left hanging from their own slogans.
There is a great fear in Miami that most of the Cuban émigrés, who hunger for the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, will liberate themselves and demand a lifting of the blockade, of the Helms-Burton Law, and the restrictions that impede the development of contacts with Cuba.
It is pathetic to see some Miami Cubans demanding foreign singers (who are absolute stars of contemporary music) to be belligerent toward a Cuban regime that they themselves renounced when they emigrated to the U.S. After the concert for peace in Havana — if it takes place — the Straits of Florida will be more a bridge than a chasm.
Cuban novelist René Vázquez Díaz won the Juan Rulfo Prize from Radio France Internacionale 2007 for his novel ‘Doctor Leal, stat.’ His latest book is ‘The Fish Knows that the Worm Conceals a Hook,’ (Icaria, Barcelona 2009).
