The Diaz-Balarts without holy water

By Luis Sexto

Anti-Castroism is a kind of obsession based on an almost-global propaganda, military, diplomatic, economic, financial and credit machine serviced by governments and institutions from a sector of the planet that long ago the media and speeches often called “the free world,” a kind of Internationale of the domination of imperialist capitalism, although the adjective may ruffle some readers.

However, as in any alliance of dissimilar entities, between the United States and some allies some contradictions arise regarding Cuba, its revolution and its government. The latest example is very recent. Spain has obtained, through a dialogue held in strict equality between the parties, what Washington has not conquered by force in half a century of armed aggression, economic restrictions and media campaigns.

We know that the Cuban government promised the Spanish Foreign Minister Moratinos and Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Archbishop of Havana, to release, over a period of four months, the 52 prisoners that remain from the 75 who in 2003 were sentenced for crimes against state security.

The pardon, amnesty, out-of-prison permit or whatever the lawyers call this liberation, does not deny that the Government of Cuba had reasons when it tried and convicted these people, whose main crime – to threaten the safety and stability of the republic – was compounded by receiving from the United States and its Interests Section in Havana the money and the means for their work of political opposition and, above all, the “per diem” that guaranteed them a living.

We journalists do not exaggerate when we say that they were paid to prepare a niche within the archipelago for Washington’s geostrategy. The propaganda in English and Spanish, baked in ovens in Miami and Washington, usually resorts to the classical political language of the 19th Century. Therefore, Castroism, derived from the surname of two of the main leaders of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, “imprisons freedom, is the executioner of the people, does not allow elections” and other attributes. The ingredients of the formula do not leave space to confirm the veracity of so many charges.

Thereinafter, everything becomes a vicious recurrence of a language that never defines the historical process we call the Cuban Revolution, which forms the dispute between the United States and socialist Cuba – socialist Cuba with all its faults and failures, but also with all its successes.

Although it may be difficult to believe, the Diaz-Balart brothers, members of Congress of the United States, participated last June in the interparliamentary meeting between the U.S. and the European Union. The two grandchildren of Don Rafael, an attorney for the United Fruit Company in Cuba who advised the huge “company” how to violate the Constitution of 1940, were members of the delegation of eight U.S. legislators. And Mario, the youngest of the clan, shrilly chided Foreign Minister Moratinos for Spain’s opposition to the “common position” of the European Union on Cuba. A common position that, as it’s easy to assume, benefits the United States in its efforts to isolate Cuba and, in particular, the Diaz-Balart brothers in their insulting and conniving war against the government of the island.

The war is so sharp that it is very hard to tell what the brothers represent on Capitol Hill. Is it the voters of Florida or the clan that the Batista family heads?

The reaction of the arrogant and disrespectful Mario Diaz-Balart did not bend the will of Spain, or keep Moratinos from coming to Havana in July and taking back a formal commitment to free the 52 men convicted in 2003, an issue that until then had been the highlight of the media campaign against Castroism.

Apparently, the sulking of the Diaz-Balart brothers comes from seeing in the Zapatero government’s attitude a threat to one of the current anti-Cuban leitmotifs, and sensing a probable leak in the horn of plenty saturated with federal funds to gestate subversion in Cuba, whose “surplus” – if I err, somebody please correct me – is patriotically used for personal gain.

Even the Catholic Church in Spain denied a contact to both lawmakers. Just as the Cuban Church has not had to talk to them to mediate in the ongoing process of dialogue. The holy water seems not to have reached, although we don’t really know if a hand dared to raise the hyssop for fear of sacrilege.

What remains to be said is also old history. Someday, those who confuse history with hysteria will have to react to the insidious propaganda and admit that Castro’s Cuba contains not only the Castros but also millions of Cubans who have risked their lives, property and welfare in exchange for their unbeatable independence and the certainty of building a just society where the savage market is not the standard for wealth and prestige.

The Diaz-Balarts, and the obsolete core of “hard-line exiles” in Miami, kidnap reality so that, acting with the same intransigence as Bob Menendez and Ileana Ros, they insist in hunkering down and spoiling any attempt to design at the Capitol a rapprochement with Castro’s Cuba.

Do they even know the history of the country where one of the two brothers was born? If they studied it in Jaime Suchlicki’s book, published in Miami, they did not learn much.

(And let me make a parenthesis here. This historian and expert on Cuban affairs threaded into his book a string of nonsense. For example, he wrote that on his first voyage Columbus discovered and explored Cuba; he asserted that Aponte freed the slaves, that Juan Gualberto Gomez was a black general, and that President Grau was a professor of philosophy and never held the chair of physiology. Much more is revealed by historian and lexicologist Argelio Santiesteban in an article on history that can be found in http://luisexto.blogia.com.)

The evidence is there. Things are moving. It does not seem a game that the Cuban government plans transformations that will improve and consolidate socialist society. And the government has demonstrated its flexible attitude by releasing some of the defendants in the 2003 trials.

But no one can deny the Cuban government the use of its good will for actions that best suit its strategic interests. No Cubanologist may exclude from his analyses that the future will have to consider the possibility of establishing more fluid and trusting links between the Cubans in the archipelago and the Cubans abroad. That dispute, which should never have arisen, remains because paladins of intrigue like the Diaz-Balart brothers muddy and demonize a natural and beneficial relationship between the two countries.

Just remember that the mere fact that the Diaz-Balarts profess and advertise their veneration for dictator Fulgencio Batista makes their intervention in any proceeding between Cubans abroad and Cubans inside suspect. Their roles in the history of Cuba are just as suspect.

Luis Sexto, Cuban journalist, winner of the 2009 José Martí Prize, contributes regularly to Progreso Weekly/Weekly.