Slavery in the barrio
By Varela
They say prostitution is the oldest profession. I think not. I think it’s politics. But, well…
I really can’t tell the difference between a whore and a City Hall official. I also thought that prostitution was the only profession practiced by those who refuse to take up any other trade, until a friend of the family, during a dinner last November, told us the following.
In trailers in Homestead – a city in southern Miami-Dade County – girls from 14 to 16 years old are kept drugged with hallucinogens 24 hours a day so they can be visited by more than 60 men each (!) who, for $5, satisfy their sexual appetites with them.
The human “product” is recycled so as not to bore the clientele, who are undocumented workers. And to keep the men from disturbing the nearby city after each workday in search of unaffordable pleasure, they are given cheap alcohol, drugs and sex right next to the fields, so they can keep agriculture going full speed.
With 200 agricultural companies, Homestead produces $250 million a year, keeping 2,000 peons on the payroll and 5,000 others (undocumented) off the payroll. But who are the owners of the tomato and fruit orchards and the flower hothouses? The same people who import those sexual slaves from Mexico. Local businessmen, consummate benefactors, heads of family, Catholics, men who donate money to political campaigns, buy ads in the ghetto press, and supply the Cuban supermarket chains. We see pictures of them on the pages of Diario Las Americas and El Nuevo Herald every week, attending galas and drinking toasts.
The friend of the family – a psychologist who works for the federal government – gave us the news last November, I repeat. The government staged a raid then and has had the sexual slaves under custody ever since, in a detox program, so they can testify in court against those promoters of the new Agricultural Sex Slavery USA.
Our friend told us that the federal authorities did not notify the local media so they could cover the raid because they know – they are convinced – that our media serves the interests of the people who promote that crime, and because the lives of the witnesses would be in danger.
At our friend’s request, my wife gave all of them a free beauty treatment so they could attend a Thanksgiving Day dinner given by the federales on December 2, the World Day Against Sexual Slavery. She did it so the girls could begin to feel human and ease their fear.
The news will break, as it always does, in the heart of the exile community, one way or another. El Nuevo Herald has already dropped some hints, apparently innocuous, to prepare the community, because the news delivered at one blow is not digestible.
Our media did the same in the case of the brother of anti-Castro activist Carlos A. Montaner, who fled almost a year ago after bilking the health system out of $2 million and hid in Costa Rica. They reported the escape five months after I reported it in my blog, a pitiful performance by the free local media.
They’ll do the same with Mario Díaz-Balart’s wife, who was charged with failing to turn over to the Internal Revenue Service the taxes collected from the employees in the advertising agency she co-manages. They’ll report it in due course.
For now, the egomaniacal hysteria of competing bloggers in Havana and the play given to the successive letters written by dissidents and former political prisoners are more interesting to our press than this crime against teenagers imported into our own society, the society where our children are raised.
Dear readers, our satellite-broadcast patriotism is meaningless if we become insensitive to our immediate environment.
