A Law Easy to Neutralize / Fernando Dámaso

Cyclically, like the seasons, the Cuban Adjustment Act appears in the national media, always to criticize it, to call it a murderous law and to demand its repeal. It is considered, although it us a U.S. law, that it intrudes on the problems of Cuba and, therefore, has an interfering character. Everything that touches the government of the island, even with the petal of a rose, is of this character. It is a legendary defense, used for too many years.

As much as they talk against it, its maintenance or repeal is vested solely in the United States government. Their legislative, judicial and executive have the final word. The rest are just media campaigns, to distract attention from more complex and important problems. Its existence, no matter what anyone says, has benefited many thousands of compatriots who have remade their lives and their families in a land of freedom, where they now live and no longer sacrifice their years, hoping for a glorious future never comes and is increasingly more distant.

Let’s consider the issue from another angle. If the Cuban authorities want to solve the problem on their hands they have the solution: simply have to restore to citizens the rights they had under the Constitution of 1940, and that were taken from them in 1959. Among them, for those who don’t know or have forgotten, the right to exit and enter the country freely and without any permit, as well as respect and protection for their property, without the ability to seize it, in addition to the exercise of all other citizen rights. If these rights are restored, the Cuban Adjustment Act would lose its raison d’etre and, naturally and without complications, would cease to apply as unnecessary. As you see, it is a decision that is entirely in the hands of those who demand its repeal. It seems absurd but it is reality.

Sometimes, at the height of the manipulation, they go so far as to say that rushed law should also apply to immigrants from other countries. Which is it, is it a killer or not? The answer is not difficult, it does not apply because these immigrants have not lost their rights as citizens in their respective countries and can freely come and go and live where they please, without losing any of their property.

It is symptomatic that a regime that has always been extremely conservative about the reception of immigrants in its own territory (the Haitian brothers are returned as soon as they hit the east coast of the country), is so worried about the situation of immigrants other countries. It smells of political expediency and is a token of eternal confrontation with the empire.

April 2 2011