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03/20/13 - EmilioIchikawa Blog (Miami) - Anti-Castroism: Being and Time (II)

Arnaldo M Fernandez

A former (2008-11) U.S. chief diplomat in Havana, Jonathan Farrar, reported
to Washington on April 15, 2009, that "despite claims that they represent
'thousands of Cubans', we see little evidence of such support [and] do not
see platforms designed to appeal to a broad cross section of Cuban society.
Rather, the greatest effort is directed at obtaining enough resources to
keep the principal organizers and their key supporters living from day to
day." No wonder that "the next most important pursuit seems to be to limit
or marginalize the activities of erstwhile allies, thus preserving power
and access to scarce resources," id est, tearing apart by themselves.  The
anti-Castroism for itself made so a curious amalgam of dissidence with food
stamps, futile opposition and symbolic resistance -from flying kites at the
Havanan Malecon up to displaying fireworks offshore- in order to present
them as capable of feasible political option. But since the wars for
independence, the Cuban people bet on a political horse only if it provides
a clue to help them guess that it could win the race. The horse ridden by
the dissidence is far away from hinting at a winning out in the end,
because the opposition has never force the Castro government to make a
minimal concession. There are no people willing to follow en masse the path
of a handful of victims.  Such a sun of the moral world can´t be covered
with a finger used to type or click for providing information or Internet
access to the Cubans inside the Isle. Money and time are wasted in
supporting trifles instead of curbing the well-planned and gradually
executed Castroit colonization of South Florida. A Castroit colonist is
whoever takes advantage of the Cuban Adjustment for settling in the U.S.
and right away exploits the synergy between the settlement and the Castroit
industry (remittances, parcels, travel) that contributes to the cash flow
into the regime.

Neither bullets nor votes The fight for human rights -horizontal dimension
of democracy- uses to be amalgamated with the political struggle, which
runs in the vertical dimension (above, those who govern; below, those who
are governed) only by the force sans phrase (nude violence) or by the force
of the numbers (voting majority).  The violent option against Castroism
melted away since the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement ending the Missile
Crisis (1962). The sole anti-Castroit power, the U.S., lost the war against
Castroism and the terrorism by exiles shared the same fate. For his last
bombings in Havana (1997), Luis Posada Carriles had to hire Central
American mercenaries. No exile is going around with such belligerencies
nowadays, except those ready for psychiatry, like Rodolfo Frómeta and his
F-4 Commandos.  The peaceful alternative, in turn, is going down the drain.
The excitement about more than a million of Cubans "dismissing" the past
general elections dodged that more than 810 thousand did it by abstaining
from voting. Non-participation works as "constructive apathy" for the
political order, as Thomas Dye and Harmon Zeigler demonstrated in The Irony
of Democracy (1970), which has recently reached its 15th edition (Wadsworth
Publishing Co., 2011).  There is not only a question of electoral logic,
but also history. In the midst of deep recession, a.k.a. special period,
Castro let the people go to the polls (1993) for directly electing the
deputies of the National Assembly by entering a polling booth with a paper
ballot, making the desired checkmarks, and coming out with the ballot
folded for dropping it through a slot in a box. Just that secret. More than
551 thousand voters chose to leave the ballot blank or voided otherwise,
but Castroism was overwhelmingly confirmed by 7 million 330 thousand voters
of the freedom-and-democracy-loving Cuban people.  The electoral support to
Castroism has never fallen from that number: the past general elections
were "not dismissed" by more than 7 millions 418 thousand voters. The wild
dream about the majority of the Cuban people against Castroism is the other
side of the frenzy for devising petitions and/or emergency appeals which
are aimed to the "unavoidable" transition to democracy, but reduce the
political action to sign them with one´s own hand inside Cuba or by
clicking abroad.  To escape from illegitimacy, the anti-Castroism for
itself brands the elections in Cuba as a farce, but eludes to address that
if the Cuban people votes again and again against its own will, its love
for freedom and democracy succumbs to something -fear, insensibility, or
whatsoever- which makes that people unable to peaceful carry out the
political struggle. In no way the anti-Castroism for itself approach the
fact that no anti-Castroit initiative coming from dissidence, opposition or
resistance has been never supported by more than 5% not yet from the
electoral body, but from the electoral Contra, which in the past two
decades ranged between 313 thousand and 552 thousand voters.

The final hour From inside Cuba, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Andres
Oppenheimer chronicled a series of dramatic events (1989-91) that should
have crippled Castroism in such a way that he found suitable the title
Castro´s Final Hour (Simon&Schuster, 1992) for his "secret story behind the
coming downfall of communist Cuba." After more than two decades,
Oppenheimer´s political short-sightedness still prevails among the
anti-Castroits for themselves.  Both the White House and Capitol Hill are
also stages for the performances and parades attached to the anti-Castroism
for itself. By taking only half-measures, divorced from the anti-Castroism
per se, the only anti-Castroit power has left as the sole alternative of
taking Fidel Castro´s word for fighting Castroism: "So long as Cuba is a
country blockaded by the empire, the victim of iniquitous laws such as the
Helms-Burton Act and the Cuban Adjustment Act, a country threatened by the
president of the United States himself, we can´t give that freedom [to
speak and write freely against Socialism and against the Revolution] to our
enemies and their allies." (My Life: A Spoken Autobiography,
Simon&Schuster, 2009, page 546).  Thus, the radical anti-Castroit measures
could be used as they use to be presented: as game tokens, but not for
playing with them the old childish game of who is going to make the first
crucial move. The political game demands a Cuba-U.S. non-aggression pact,
which includes repealing the Helms-Burton Act, the Cuban Adjustment, the
Embargo, and the rest alike, in exchange for a constitutional reform in
Cuba which concedes "that freedom" and, by extension, all the other basic
freedoms.  If that should be deemed as mission impossible, then the
transition to democracy in Cuba is not a political question, but something
appropriate for a church. And if the sole anti-Castroit power is also
unable to stop the Castroit colonization in South Florida, sooner o later
Washington and Havana will agree that both the anti-Castroism per se and
for itself has become obsolete.