The local brouhaha

By Varela

The Cuban media in Miami interpret the letter by Carlos Saladrigas, signed by 74 dissidents in Cuba, in their own manner.

Written from a viewpoint in opposition to the Cuban government, the screed asks the Yankee Congress for an end to the economic sanctions against Cuba, for the free trample of Americans on the island, and, among other things, for the tourists to cooperate with the liberation of the people, some way or other.

(An aside. I don’t know why a tourist would want to stick his nose in the social problems of the resort he’s enjoying. A tourist’s common sense tells him that, if things change, the most logical consequence is for the price of the tour package to go up. Look how Cancún and Cozumel are faring, in the middle of the tourist season, as a result of the violence in Mexico.

(Anyway, no tourism column in the world has ever reported that a bunch of Americans leaped out of a tour bus brandishing M-60s and machine-gunned a municipal building. If the tourists were paid to do it, maybe. But, as it happens, it’s the tourists who pay to travel.)

Last Friday on Radio Mambí, Ninoska Pérez Castellón, aided by Zoé Valdés from Paris, staged a radio hassle – a pantomime as grotesque as TV wrestling – against Guillermo Fariñas, a dissident who has spent more than 100 years on a hunger strike in Cuba.

Saladrigas’ letter (or The Letter of the 74, if you wish) was the detonator that allowed the radio bile to pour on Fariñas. He was accused of receiving a payoff, of being a privileged man, and doing his anorexic shtick “aided” by the government, which provides him with intravenous food and nourishes him through anal suppositories.

The fakir of Santa Clara became persona non grata on Radio Mambí, while Martha Beatriz Roque, who refused to sign the letter, was vindicated and returned to the airwaves. Only in Miami. Fariñas lost viewership points, even though he signed an opposition document and has been three months without ingesting solids.

The thing is, to the Miamian ultra-right, any opposition variant that includes the lifting of the economic blockade, or any such moderate act, is a conspiracy with Fidel and Raúl, like the “treason” committed by certain Ladies in White, among them the wife of Elías Biscet, who asked for a pause in their street walks to achieve the true objective of the white dresses and gladioli: the release of their imprisoned relatives.

As things stand now, at Channel 41, the local bastion of anti-Castro TV, the Vice Dean of the Cuban Studies Center, Andy Gómez, is asking for Cardenal Ortega to be expelled from the island, robe, red skull cap and all, while at Channel 22 dissident Héctor Palacios denounces from Cuba that the signers of the letter are being threatened with anonymous phone calls from Miami, accusing them of being communists, opportunists, defeatists and several other “ists.”

Saladrigas, who was also accused of being a usurer, not a banker, confirmed the harassment on the same program.

Suddenly, the opposition’s setup is falling apart, because it’s obvious that the ultra-right doesn’t want to improve the lives of the Cuban people but instead play at democracy with the millions of USAID bucks that stay (almost all of ’em) in Miami. They even protect their interests with intimidation and fear. All of a sudden, the Miami ultra-right becomes a mob staging an act of repudiation against the dissidents on the island.

It’s understood that these folks, alien to the Cuban people, need the current economic sanctions, that’s why they support them. They know that the sanctions do not exert any pressure on the Cuban government but are an instrument to create popular malaise, social asphyxia and hatred.

They repeat ad nauseam that Cuba’s problem is its government, not the embargo. That explanation is as cynical as apparently real. If the current government resigns, the economic sanctions end. Except that no economic embargo has ever toppled a government. That’s why our ultras are so far from reality that they oppose each other and shoot themselves in the foot.

Anyway, the sorriest part of this sorry mess was the incident on Radio Mambí last Friday, because they should have chosen other, more appropriate people to confront a professional hunger striker – not two overweight, ill-natured women who are apologists for the Batista era, a past that was erased by our history and by millions of Cubans.

Born in Cuba in 1955, José Varela was an editorial cartoonist in Miami for 15 years, at Éxito magazine (1991-97) and El Nuevo Herald (1993-2006). A publicist and television writer, he is a member of the Progreso Weekly team.