Lincoln Díaz-Balart: Presidential material and a passion for roses
By Elíades Acosta Matos
On Feb. 11, at Florida International University, Lincoln Díaz-Balart read a press release announcing his refusal to run for a tenth term in the U.S. Congress and, incidentally, his intention to turn to private business and the cultivation of a ghostly variety of white roses.
What to some is an inexplicable decision to others is transparent enough to reveal the most scrupulously premeditated acts. The press release had too many superfluous words and too few convincing arguments.
One doesn’t need Hercule Poirot’s nose to understand that a play of this type is never improvised. It was cooked long ago in the basement kitchens of the Diaz-Balart clan and the clan’s discreet associates in U.S. politics.
One doesn’t have to be very shrewd to guess what lies behind this moving passion for gardening, expressed in the communiqué with an elegant multicultural twist so politically correct that it combined words from Anwar el-Sadat and the biblical (and sly) reminder that “there’s a time for everything under the sun.”
Let us separate Mr. Diaz-Balart’s reasons from their honey-sweet wrapping. Let us, for a moment, disperse the clouds of incense with which they are presented in that Messianic and redemptive tone that sometimes reminds us of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Let us try to dig into the true causes of a quasi-ethereal decision made by a pragmatic, insensitive and pitiless politician who is capable of boasting (as he did in that communiqué) that he had codified the trade blockade that has for years tried to bring the island government to its knees but has succeeded only in hurting the ordinary Cubans.
There were previous hints of the play – pardon me, I meant patriotic sacrifice – made by Mr. Diaz-Balart.
Barely one week after the announcement, columnist Guillermo Martínez wrote in The South Florida Sun-Sentinel that because “the Cuban-American community in South Florida is no longer as homogeneous as it once was […] the Republican Party’s grip on this area is likely to diminish.”
Martínez also recalled an interview he had with Rafael Diaz-Balart days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. According to Martinez, Diaz-Balart Sr. spoke with enthusiasm about his efforts to strengthen The White Rose and said that Cubans in exile should have fewer internal fights. Diaz-Balart Sr. told Martinez that if his son succeeded in reviving that organization, someday Cuba and the Cubans on the island would be grateful to him.
Four years later, in May 2005 and after the death of Diaz-Balart Sr. (a Deputy Minister of the Interior for Batista’s dictatorship, a regime that wasn’t exactly characterized by its fraternal love toward its antagonists) some alleged statement he made in April 1955 to the Cuban House of Representatives were published in several languages, as in response to a mysterious order. In that statement Diaz-Balart Sr. opposed amnesty for political prisoners, especially Fidel Castro and the raiders of the Moncada army barracks.
Zoe Valdés read that whole “prophetic” statement when she was invited to the presentation of a book written by Diaz-Balart Sr., whom she compared not only to Varela, Céspedes and Martí but also “to the highest universal thinkers.”
I have already demonstrated that Diaz-Balart Sr. never made that statement to the House. [1] That indomitable legislator who, by an act of prestidigitation, was portrayed as the founder of a family of visionaries and saviors of the Motherland, was among the 114 Cuban legislators who, on 18 and 19 April 1955, voted in favor of the amnesty bill before them.
The meaning of that trickery has become clear now. The illustrious founder of the clan had disappeared but he had left his cubs well cared for, through his direct participation in U.S. politics. He also bequeathed them a prophetic pedigree, or (just the same) a symbolic asset they could claim upon reaching a hypothetic post-Castro Cuba.
Who could refuse the presidential seat to those who had demonstrated a strict loyalty to their supporters, who had contacts in Washington, a conservative record beyond reproach, a visceral hatred for all revolutionary matters (which would have to be swept from the island), and the holy aura of the select members of the imperial Roman College of the Augurs?
To leave nothing to chance and eliminate any romantic or untimely competition, to leave everything “tied up, well tied up,” as Generalissimo Francisco Franco said in his deathbed, Lincoln Diaz-Balart – this presidential material through family ties and patronage – mentioned as “heroes and leaders of a future Cuba” the names of Biscet and Antúnez. He may have been too quick at naming his choices and plunging in despair his write-offs.
He omitted names frequently uttered in the international media, such as Martha Beatriz Roque, who could be Cuba’s first woman president, or Elizardo Sánchez, an oppositionist blessed with great eloquence, or Vladimiro Roca, a former combat pilot. Why?
“The White Rose is an ideal on the march,” was another enigmatic charade with which Lincoln Diaz-Balart declined to run for a new term, referring to the bellicose organization founded by his father in early 1959.
In the White Rose’s political program we might find another clue to decipher that charade and to make our debut as prophets. “The [future] President of the Republic, by constitutional mandate, will have to resign as member of any political party and every partisan post after being elected Chief Executive and before taking possession of his high post.”
Could it be that someday this rough-and-ready Republican will startle us by formally quitting the Grand Old Party as the prelude to his inevitable sacrifice for the future of Cuba?
What’s interesting about this scenario is that it is based in the cutting up of the skin of a bear no one has killed and that it views the Cuban people as only background furniture. Not only that, it re-enacts (almost perfectly) the enthronement of those Messianic saviors who have followed the American occupation troops elsewhere, selected precisely because they had the same attributes that today make this disinterested “renouncer” such good presidential material.
That’s how Tomás Estrada Palma entered history, the Cuban connection for the 1898 “Party of the War Against Spain” formed by imperialists like Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert Beveridge, William Randolph Hearst and Theodore Roosevelt. Also Hamid Karzai, the obedient Afghan president who happens to be the link between the CIA and the Afghan guerrillas who fought against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Maybe the key to the mystery is in the press release itself. In “The DaVinci Code,” Dan Brown revived the obvious enigma (introduced by Edgar Allan Poe to police literature) that the best way to hide something is to place it in full view of everyone. Maybe that explains Diaz-Balart’s allusion to Anwar el-Sadat, who collaborated with the Nazis and was accused of turning his back on the Arab nations when he allied himself with foreign powers.
Maybe. Who knows?
Eliades Acosta Matos, a Cuban philosopher and writer, is a member of the Progreso Weekly team.
[1] Read Eliades Acosta Matos’ “The False Gift of Prophecy of Rafael Díaz-Balart,” in http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2005/06/20/el-falso-don-de-profecia-de-rafael-diaz-balar
