Violent beings
By Varela
The exiles now are horrified by the background of the latest prisoners released in Cuba and sent to Spain.
It is already being said that Raúl Castro is mixing common prisoners with political prisoners to discredit the image of the “Patriotic Former Prisoners.”
The problem is more complex than that. The truth is that many delinquents have found in prison a way, a way out, a happier modus vivendi when they turn into dissidents and place their names on eponymous labels (according to the canons of the ultraright) to protect themselves.
The criminal record of Guillermo Fariñas says he attacked a woman on the street, beat an old man with a cane (the old man lost an arm due to the trauma) and attacked a fellow cadet with a knife.
That’s what the police says, of course, not his relatives or his mother.
If you interviewed my mother in Cuba, she would tell you I’m incapable of hijacking a newsroom.
Understand?
The fact that Fariñas could stage hunger strikes to protest for this or that made him a symbol to the dissident brigade, always looking for icons for its cause.
The other poor man who starved himself to death last February had a record even more violent than Fariñas’.
Some ordinary delinquents are co-opted to join the list of political prisoners because the groups who are outside (mostly in Miami) “struggling” for them need for the list never to run out, they need a never-ending list of prisoners “of conscience.”
And they even push them into violent self-destruction, conducting a constant media siege against the Havana regime, looking for some inmate who will hurt himself, another one who will poke his own eye out.
For that purpose, the Miami groups telephone the relatives of the prisoners, slip them money, motivate them so their relatives in prison will become political activists behind bars, develop an opposition discourse that can be sold to the foreign press, and stage violent protests.
That is why many people who are arrested for street brawls, for knife and razor duels, once inside the prison adopt postures of criticism of the government and join dissident groups.
But all of a sudden that reality has exploded in the faces of the ultraright. Once the prisoners are freed, we can read their criminal records, which can’t be concealed because it’s like trying to cover the sun with one’s thumb.
Among the latest 11 to be released, there are many who committed criminal acts that are punishable in any society.
One of them stole guns from a police station and hijacked a launch, whose captain jumped into the water and drowned. The launch was captured when it ran out of fuel. That’s punishable in any society in the world, whether it is leftist, rightist, Buddhist or Muslim.
Another former prisoner was involved in the theft of another boat, an act in which the perpetrators threw grenades and killed 13 people. That man is now free after serving a good many years. Canada refused to take him; that country has very strict laws that forbid the entry of people with violent records.
Here’s something ironic. Fariñas, a delinquent who apparently became a fighter for peace and received the Sakharov Award for his struggle by hunger strikes (he survived all of them), should use part of the money he received to reimburse the Cuban Health Ministry for the months he spent at the Santa Clara provincial hospital occupying the bed of a real patient, because in Cuba people wait on line for admission to a hospital. There, doctors saved his life by giving him drips, medicines and antibiotics; they even kept him in an air-conditioned room.
The Cuban society in which criminals become political dissidents overnight and troublesome patients don’t pay for their months-long treatment in hospitals is something I don’t understand and probably never will.
Undoubtedly, it is a society very different from the one in which I live.
