The tantrum
By Alejandro Armengol
From the blog Cuaderno de Cuba
More than 50 years have gone by and they’ve accomplished nothing.
Well, at least in terms of what they proclaim daily: the end of the Cuban government. Because, in other aspects, you can’t deny their successes, particularly their economic achievements. But the daily repetition of tired old concepts finds acceptance only in a community that’s deeply disconnected from reality. And that’s Miami.
Their kind of emotional unburdening can be found only in this city. Neither in New Jersey, home to a large exile community and to noted anti-Castro terrorists, nor in any other city in the United States or the rest of the world can one find a similar capacity to feed an illusion.
With the passing of years, this illusion has moved ever more distant from its source and acquired its own characteristics. From the social, political and economic point of view, few on the island want a return to yesterday’s Cuba, because most Cubans didn’t live through it and don’t formulate their wishes in such terms. What a sector of the exile community here in Miami still misses, on a daily basis, has become part of a fantasy that nobody in his right mind expects to reappear any time soon.
This illusion – which provokes skepticism in Washington, mockery in Madrid and a shrug in Santiago or Sydney – is a distraction for the exiles who, from a personal standpoint, continue to fortify their future. They continue to pay taxes and mortgages and struggle to keep their jobs and educate their children.
Meanwhile, there’s no dearth of small opportunities to vent their rancor. We still listen daily in this city to those who talk about the future of Cuba, but few – more properly, no one – risk defining “their future” in terms of the fate of the island.
That’s one of the many reasons why they’ve disqualified themselves from participating in any decision in that respect.
For many years, the characteristics of the American electoral process gave them the opportunity to influence a future in which they thought they risked nothing (never mind how silly that belief was), yet in which they could still be actors, albeit second-class participants.
The result was that, during decades, U.S. policy toward the Cuban regime – particularly in a series of minor aspects that didn’t basically affect the existence of the Havana government, although they hampered commercial relations and for a while hindered exchanges and links between citizens on both sides of the Straits – was not evaluated and executed on the basis of effectiveness but on emotional complacence toward a sector of the Cuban community that wielded the right to vote.
The paradox is that there are Cuban-Americans who, in a sense, have quit being Cuban-Americans. They gain the ability to vote like U.S. citizens, not according to what’s best or worst for their adoptive country but according to what they think is convenient for their nation of birth, from which they are increasingly distant and which they have reduced to a mythological place. They become foreigners for reasons of convenience but don’t give up trying to influence the future of the country they left behind.
What’s worst about this is that their influence is not guided by spontaneous criteria but ends up in the hands of loud-mouths, demagogues and opportunities of the worst kind who simply take advantage of people’s political immaturity, frustration and disenchantment to enrich themselves.
Now then, what happens when these citizens – who in the end belong neither here nor there – lose in the elections, when their candidate is defeated and the new tenant of the White House does not return their calls and has no reason to respond to the narrow interests of those who didn’t vote for him?
What happens is a tantrum. What’s remarkable is that, in the first year of the Obama administration, the tantrums have decreased a lot. And that’s encouraging.
Alejandro Armengol was born in Cuba and has lived in the U.S. since 1983. He has a weekly column in El Nuevo Herald and publishes another in the website Encuentro en la Red. He is an associate professor at the University of Miami.
