Trickery meant to confuse

MIAMI – The laws inside Cuba define the way in which government and people are related, and in no way can those laws be shaken under pressure from abroad. That’s precisely what the sinister group hiding behind the daughter of the late Oswaldo Payá attempted to do.

This time, she appeared as part of a youth forum called “Ibero-American Vanguard,” an underhanded project to manipulate the structures of the Cuban state that was presented to the heads of state gathered at the recent 23rd Ibero-American Summit in Panama.

The summit was held this time in a country where the ruling right, along with its financial friends from South Korea, places the country’s mining resources in the hands of the company called Inmet-Minera Panama and watches civilian society through two sinister ministries.

It doesn’t surprise me that more than half the invited rulers did not participate this time, but I am amazed that the young people in the “Youth Forum” lent themselves as a platform for a political agenda as partisan as the one presented by Payá’s daughter.

Could it be said that this project is nonpartisan because it promotes a plebiscite that supposedly is something not partisan? No, because those who organized it from the shadows are a political group that’s rooted in the European and U.S. right. And let’s not even talk about the high possibility that the intelligence community of some major power was involved in the forum’s making.

The attempts to infiltrate and manipulate nongovernmental organizations that are allegedly apolitical – like this youth forum – are lamentable, because they pollute the true critical, progressive and sincere spirit of youth groups.

In general, young people and idealistic and filled with good wishes and projects that they want to present to heads of state. It is grotesque that among those young people appeared a puppet with hostile plans, like this young woman at the service of the old international ultraright.

Does this enemy of Cuban nationalism know that she’s being used by people who truly do not believe in plebiscites?

The much-touted representative democracy is not participative and leaves many young people out of its plans. Rosa María Payá likely is not aware that here in the United States, not to go far, 15 percent of young people neither work nor study, according to The Opportunity Nation. Does she think that young people outside Cuba are integrated into society and participate in politics?

The trickery wielded by those who want to dismantle the Cuban state is to muddle public opinion with criticism of the government of the island, which in reality is criticism of the state. State and government are not the same thing.

To illustrate, here in the United States people tolerate criticism of the governments, whether they are Democratic or Republican, but criticism of the state is never seen kindly. The Constitution and the structures that define this federation are sacred and untouchable, and I imagine that every other country defends itself in like manner. Paya’s daughter doesn’t know that, maybe because of political ignorance, obedience to masters we cannot see, or simple human arrogance.

She and her sponsors thought they could falsify reality, by presenting to the leaders at the Ibero-American Summit – with apparent innocence – a proposal for a plebiscite for Cuba, as if the Cubans on the island were lacking in courage and intelligence, and as if the will of the people had never been previously consulted.

We all know that if the oppositionists had popular support, their candidates would easily win several local elections, so what these hypocritical strategies are aimed at is not to democratize Cuba beyond its present democratization but to alter the structure of the state to introduce entities of electoral manipulation that, like recon raiders, will serve the global right to conquer national spaces.

While I don’t deny that specific questions of national interest could be submitted to a plebiscite, I consider it a disrespect to Cubans for the international right to tell the people inside the island how they should be governed, through pseudo-liberal tricks planned abroad by people who neither love nor respect Cuba.