Peddlers of smoke

By Yadira Escobar

MIAMI – Last May 4, at an arts store on Miami’s Calle Ocho, a group of Cubans met with the leader of Estado de Sats [State of Sats*] to formally fantasize about the collapse of the Cuban government.

All of us wish to be happy and it is quite legitimate to aspire to a better life through change, but one has to beware of the peddlers of smoke. Remember those charlatans that used to sell flasks of water for vigor and health; more recently, those who advertise antioxidants more powerful than the fruit of life in the Garden of Eden.

I say that they only want to swindle us and sell us a slavish fraud in the guise of a remedy.

Antonio Rodiles talks a lot about "the other Cuba" and flirts with the illusions about change and improvement that every human being harbors. But behind his propaganda of emancipatory illusions hides a covert action for unadulterated deceit.

This little group uses the intellectual language of the European liberal right, but clears the ideological road for the return to Cuba of the old reactionary and retrograde right, which loves the large lordly manors, the traditional political parties and all the vices of the decadent capitalism that exists in the Miami they now control.

We’re looking at intellectuals who, after taking advantage of the benefits of Cuban universities, so connected to the socialist project, shift to the right with a prodigious ease that leaves me breathless. I suspect they must generate some contempt even in the foreign ideologues who plan the dismantling of the Cuban state by subversive means.

Something similar to this intellectual subversion occurred from 1953 to 1967 with the magazine "Encounter," which circulated in Britain, the U.S., Africa and Asia, put out by the Fairfield Foundation (a CIA front) to infiltrate socialist intellectual thoughts. The discourse on its pages was so liberal that on occasion one could find criticism of the United States, so – let’s not be fooled by liberal discourse!

Naturally, artists lean toward autonomous thought and there is a method to provoke political changes by taking advantage of that tendency, as was done during the Cold War.
At that time, the financial resources of the CIA were used – through foundations – to create Abstract Expressionism (a totally artificial movement) and provide the scandalous secret funding for Halas and Batchelor’s movie "Animal Farm" in 1951.

Accompanied by "philosophers" who talk more about Hegel than Martí, Rodiles and his group try to portray themselves as an intelligent option to move toward another Cuba where we all shall be "prosperous and happy" under the motto "Every man for himself." 
To conceal their radical liberalism, they talk of dreams, freedoms, all kinds of personal aspirations, but never take into account the collective rights of Cubans.

The trick of appealing to individualism as an engine of change resides first in leaving out of that alleged transition the mass movements and their cooperative spirit, so they can secretly organize – under foreign orders – that "other Cuba" without sovereignty or shared prosperity.

I don’t see in Rodiles’ group the signs of a political opposition to the Cuban government. Rather, I see the subversive style of the movements created to dismantle state structures. Estado de Sats apparently does not seek to form a parallel government but rather a parallel state, and maybe that is why it tries to create unofficial mini-institutions for the arts, philosophy, intellectual debate and, of course, mini-concerts.

The lack of patriotism of Estado de Sats coincides with its leader’s support for the economic embargo against the Cuban people, which Rodiles apparently considers effective as equating philosophical discussions with the strangling of a state he attempts to subvert.

Now, thanks to the reforms, this opportunistic dissident group says that there are no reforms (even as it takes advantage of the emigration reforms) and selfishly sabotages the changes in Cuba, hastening to disqualify them before the Cuban community in Miami, in an attempt to manipulate sectors of the émigré community that imagine that Cuba still has the type of society they left decades ago.

Do they do that for the love of art? Of course not; I DON’T believe it. Why do they try to improve culture when Cuba already has institutions that look after the arts? Behind the facade of free thinking are the usual methods utilized to weaken the people’s sovereignty, and I find it very distasteful for them to manipulate the most vulnerable Cuban artists and freethinkers with as wicked a project as theirs is.

I like honest people. I detest double standards and hypocrisy. Common sense tells us who are the traitors to the national soul. The truth is almost never as abstract as these "intellectuals" paint it with fancy words. It seems to me that the true culture, arts, and even philosophy, are found in the humblest depths of the Cuban nation.

* Estado de Sats describes itself in its Web page as a space where different visions – such as the arts, thought and social activism – come together and affect the picture of a diverse and pluralistic Cuba.

Yadira Escobar lives in Hialeah Gardens and contributes to Progreso Semanal/Weekly. Her blog is Yadiraescobar.com.