Category: Jeovany J. Vega

Bullard’s first mistake was in presuming that freedom, an elusive and abstract concept, can be achieved so easily — one might almost say physically — by doing someting as simple as dropping leaflets over Havana’s seaside promenade, the Malecón. But it does not make sense when dealing with closed societies such as Cuba and North Korea. In these instances, any analysis must first and foremost take into account decades of indiscriminate indoctrination that has caused untold moral harm and turned citizens into apathetic and uncritical masses, stript of their civic involvement. These are wounds that will take virtually a generation to overcome and whose ultimate conequence is the awful weight of social apathy caused by too many decades of unchecked abuse of power.

To claim that it is private businesses — hostals, restaurants and cafes for example — where the greatest battle of ideas is taking place in Cuba today suggests a total ignorance of our reality. To say something like that indicates an almost complete misreading of Cuban affairs. It ignores the reckless activism waged for many years and decades by Cuba’s political opposition, which has fought a continuous, uphill battle against one of the best organized and most repressive intelligence agencies the world has ever seen.

In fact, it is precisely these businesses where I would least expect to find open or even casual discussions critical of the Castro-communist regime. It is an axiom, written in stone at the entrance to each of these establishments, that their very survival is dependent on their owners’ complete acquiescence to authority, something even the lowliest employee knows all too well, the sine qua non. The threat of immediate closure has always proven to be a highly effective tool of social coercion.

I challenge anyone to look online and find even one anti-establishment webpage maintained by one of these entrepreneurs and I will calmly put my right hand under the guillotine with all the confidence in the world. I will then raise my hand intact as evidence that a flourishing private sector without political reforms would not necessarily lead to a greater array of dissenting opinions. At least not given the current rules of the game.

It seems Bullard is completely unaware that all the wealth generated by businesses and travelers from the U.S., which he claims would lead to greater freedom, would go directly into the hands of the Castro regime, not to the country’s people. It is a unmitigated error to look for the causes of our misfortune outside of Cuba. It is not about Donald Trump, nor the persistence of the American embargo, nor the shortage of American tourists. No, the essential causes of all our ills is always be found in the obsessions of four senile old men who from the Plaza of the Revolucion keep an entire country in a state of backwardness with their capricious whims and penurious personal interests.

Our columnist is mistaken if he believes that casual contact with tourists is enough to ignite and maintain this enthusiasm for private business. If that is what he thinks, he is totally ignorant of our experience. In fact, our entrepreneurial spirit was never completely snuffed out. There are hundreds if not thousands of clandestine workshops and businesses nurtured by the black market behind the back of the autocratic state. They can serve you with a beer on a back patio as they repair your Sputnik and put it into orbit. A notable example? Our celebrated almendrones — restored American cars from the 1950s — those sixty-year old testaments to Creole ingenuity, which does not give out even in the most trying circumstances. It is precisely that spirit that intimidates those in power and is the reason they tie our hands.

Does Mr. Bullard believe that enthusiasm is all it takes for an entrepreneur to keep a business in Cuba open without the existence of a basic wholesale market, in the midst of the worst shortages in our history and when faced with an army of inspectors on constant attack and armed with a body of absurd laws whose only purpose is to hinder success? Every enterprise of this type in Cuba gets by on pure courage, with no thanks to the Castro government but rather in spite of it.

According to analyses like that of Bullard, not taking advantage of “openings” that the Cuban government is “allowing” in order to bring freedom to the island is a stupid political strategy. However, so is not being aware that these so-called openings are nothing more than a pure scam, glitz intended to deceive the world. There is nothing authentic, certain or sincere to be found in them. Coming from a naive beginner, these comments could be taken as a baffling dispaly of myopia, but not from a professional journalist.

Or perhaps Bullard is ignoring the fact that, of every one-hundred private businesses that register in Cuba, no less than eighty close within a few months. Are Cubans bad managers? No. The regime itself has admitted that its strategy is to prevent the “accumulation of wealth” — in other words, to prevent people from being prosperous — at all costs. At the beginning of August, Raúl Castro issued a clear warning by launching an offensive against the private sector, canceling business licenses for dozens of previously allowed activities.

Where but in Havana are laws drafted that restrain Cuba’s private sector economy, ignore farmers’ management decisions and prohibit the free sale of their products, resulting in half the nation’s crops rotting in the field? What good is a livestock farmer’s “enthusiasm” if current laws severely restrict his economic growth? What openings are people talking about when there are dozens of legal tools designed specifically to thwart the success of non-state initiatives, tools used over and over to seize the properties of “backsliders”?

Who drafts the laws that handcuff our most cherished civil and political rights? Washington perhaps? No, all these aberrations have been crafted in Havana. What purpose is served when the eagerness and desire of Cuban exiles to invest in their own country is banned  for decades by the bad faith of the implacable dictatorship? No purpose is served.

It is neither Trump nor his predecessors who have deprived the Cuban nation of its accumulated wealth. It is the bad faith of the Castro brothers.

Blithely expressing an opinion about Cuba today — a society crushed by a totalitarian dictatorship in which things are never as they seem — will always carry a high risk of error. Bullard’s point of view overlooks one key detail: the dictatorship itself.

What did Fidel Castro leave behind? What did Cubans inherit from his more than half-century legacy? The answer is not always a simple one because almost nothing is simple in Cuba, where the reality itself is often tinged with varying shades of light and shadow.

From Fidel Castro’s point of view, he leaves behind a country with virtually no illiteracy and an educational system accessible to everyone everywhere within the country’s borders. It seems idyllic, especially in light of the repeated positive assessments by UNICEF. But let’s not forget an essential point: Not everything here is so rosy.

There is only one centralized, compulsory system of education, imposed on everyone, which provides no alternative. Parents cannot choose what kind of schooling their children will receive. Every day children must swear an oath: “Pioneers for Communism; we will be like Che!” They are taught by educators suffering from enormous personal frustration. In exchange for their enormous efforts, teachers receive paltry salaries, working under the most inadequate of conditions in schools that are in near ruin. Additionally, every child is subjected to political indoctrination, which is responsible in large part for the unfortunate loss of civic culture paralyzing Cuban society today.

And what is there to say about public health? The country which boasts of its achievements in biotechnology, universal childhood vaccination and state-of-the-art clinics catering to foreigners — comparable only to those reserved for exclusive use by elite government officials — is the same country whose neighborhood medical clinics stand empty and whose pharmacies suffer from a constant shortage of medications.

Its excellent doctors are paid poverty-level wages, must deal with unimaginable scarcities and work under deplorable conditions in hospitals which are structurally unsound and which, in many instances, should be demolished.

The government of Fidel Castro has always relied on its medical missions to more than sixty countries — “in search of the world’s poor” — as its trump card. Under the heel of Raul Castro, those same missions greedily skim 70% off the salaries of its overseas medical personnel.

This slave trade generates between 8 to 10 billion dollars a year. Meanwhile, the government shamelessly rails, with characteristic cynicism, against worldwide capitalist exploitation.

The very serious crisis in Cuban sport is so obvious that it is scarcely worth discussing. The defections of more than two-hundred top-flight baseball players to the “brutal north” in search of better opportunities in recent years are a slap in the face of the deceased, who used sport as a weapon of propaganda. But the humiliating and mediocre performances of a wide range of athletes in international arenas suggest that things could hardly get much worse.

And what has the “invincible” comandante left behind on the field of economics? Anything one might say on such a potent and cruel topic risks sounding redundant. The profound economic damage resulting from the endless trail of Fidel Castro’s erratic policies continues to have ongoing repercussions. So absurd and systemic was the damage that it has become insoluble, at least under the current rules of the game imposed by the military dictatorship, which subordinates everything to its perverse predilection for control.

In spite of having enjoyed the world’s most generous subsidies — courtesy of the former Soviet Union —for its first three decades, Cuba has never experienced a period of real economic independence or credible growth during the entire Castro era. It later suckled on the nipple provided by Hugo Chavez, who always had to cradle the drooling mouth of the silly child because it never learned to support itself.

It is an undeniable fact that the comandante’s government, like that of its successor, never managed to overcome its prodigious parasitic habits. Its survival always depended on an outside supplier. In short, the dictator leaves behind a desolated country, perpetually in the red and without a a credible development plan in sight.

Did the comandante opt for persuasion, for convincing argument, in order to govern? Did he exercise his power through normal, healthy and necessary confrontation — free of judgment — with a dissenting legislature in which opposition was a daily reality, as in all free societies? Certainly not. From the very beginning, he penalized difference of opinion and buried the press under a blanket of hermetic censorship.

He monopolized national editorial policy and all mass media, maintaining an iron-fisted stranglehold which he never eased. Under his totalitarian dictatorship there was never anything that might be called a parliament. Instead, a circus of marionettes met once a year to give consent — always by unanimous vote — to orders previously approved by the Central Committee of his Communist Party.

The shocking human rights situation has been a constant for the entirety of the Castro regime. It represents a very long saga of systematic abuse, a logical consequence of having no separation of powers. The noteworthy indices of political repression have been the immutable backdrop of Cuban society for more than five decades, though they have become something of a scandal since the thaw in relations with the United States was announced. The dearly departed leaves behind, as testament to his despotism, about a hundred political prisoners in jail cells, to say nothing of the thousands who preceded them.

The comandante also bequeathed to Cuban history four great waves of emigration, confirming his scandalous failure as a ruler. Young people fled in terror from their enslavement, an eloquent expression of an entire people’s discontent. Well organized exoduses were augmented by an endless string of drownings from sunken rafts in the Florida Straits, a deeply painful saga for the Cuban people caused, once again, by Fidel Castro’s absolutism.

But let’s try to shed light on at least one small aspect of the genius which frontmen and toadies attribute to him. Let’s look at the tactical “solutions” the tyrant imposed as well as their practical and permanent long-term consequences. For example, no sooner had revolutionaries won than they found themselves with a housing problem. Did the comandante promote a coherent national program of building new housing to meet the demand? No. It was easier to steal long-held properties from their rightful owners through to the Urban Reform Law. The consequences? Even today, half a century later, housing remains one of the country’s most serious problems and perhaps the hardest one to solve.

In 1959 the newly triumphant comandante also found himself facing the problem of land distribution. But once the Agrarian Reform Law was adopted, did it create the conditions necessary for small-scale farmers to flourish? Did it vigorously stimulate agricultural and livestock production throughout the country? No. Instead it imposed one absurd regulation after another in order to impede, by any means necessary, agricultural producers’ financial success. It created multiple mechanisms to limit their profits and unleashed the Attorney General’s watchdogs on any misguided soul who had acquired wealth by dint of his own legitimate efforts.

The consequences? Even today, meager harvests rot in the fields thanks to the well-documented irresponsibility of the Empresa Nacional de Acopio (National Harvest Company) — an ineffective monopoly and the sole entity in charge agricultural harvesting. Even today, as an indefensibly large proportion of the country’s arable land remains plagued by maribu weed, Cuba imports millions of dollars worth of food, including — of all things — sugar. Fields lie untended due to, as always, the whims and stubbornness of the country’s rulers. Meanwhile, shortages of basic staples set new records week after week.

An uninterrupted mass exodus began in early 1959, most notably of professionals, when a segment of the population felt disappointed by the first populist measures. What did the newly-inaugurated prime minister, Fidel Castro, do to halt or discourage it? Did he improve working conditions or offer better salaries to those professionals? No. He chose, as usual, to restrict the the right of all Cubans to travel freely for decades and prohibited any overseas travel that did not have official authorization. The consequences? The island literally became one vast prison, serving as Fidel Castro’s private gulag for more than fifty years. During that time the despot deprived us of the universal right to freely come and go from our own country.

It is also worth remembering one fateful moment: When faced with the challenge of a democratic election in 1960, did he fulfill the promise he made in the Sierra Maestra to hold elections after eighteen months in power? Never! Instead he coined that celebrated slogan “Elections for what?” The unfortunate consequences of that failure translate into an absence of political freedom today. The consequences? Since then, there has been a complete disregard by Cuba’s military/political elite for our natural right to free thought and for many of the most basic human rights, an offensive contempt resulting from, above all, the twisted personality of Fidel Castro.

Faced with the persistence of tens of thousands of private businesses and family micro-enterprises throughout the country, did the comandante develop a parallel national system of consumer services that would compete on an equal footing with those of the extensive private sector? Was their promise finally fulfilled, providing better services to the people? Absolutely not. Instead, he launched the notorious Revolutionary Offensive in March 1968, which in a few months swept away the legacy of millions of entrepreneurs who had amassed their fortunes as a result of generations of honest work.

This wave of brazen confiscation, followed by widespread institutional laziness, led to a dramatic and irreversible decline in the food service industry and every possible consumer service from Cabo San Antonio to Punta Maisí. The consequences? Even today, this sector remains one of the most eloquent testimonials to the inefficiency and corruption of a system as centralized as that of Cuba.

In other words, this bearded reprobate always opted for the easiest, most mediocre, most simplistic solution — coincidentally, usually the one he had come up with — that in the long run would lead to the worst consequences.

Where is the supposed genius in leading the country into absurdist economic ruin, trampling on people’s human rights, putting power in the hands of an arrogant oligarchy with bourgeois tastes, creating a disturbed, dysfunctional society and turning it into a quagmire of moral ruin? What fanciful argument could purport that a life so aberrant and demonstrably harmful to the Cuban people was virtuous?

Other than stores in several countries being closed, there was nothing memorable about last Friday, November 25, except for the day’s top story. Nothing of consequence will happen in Cuba after this date because it marked an outcome for which the dictatorship has had sufficient time to prepare. The military will, for now, keep everything under control and business will continue as its usual.

The tyrant died but he left behind an intact dictatorship, with an organized army of henchmen and repressors well-trained in all manner of coercion, intimidation and blackmail. It acts like an eager, arrogant hitman who has his finger on the trigger, always at the ready. In his profound alienation, he would not hesitate to calmly pull it as soon as the order was received.

The dictatorship’s capacity for repression remains intact; the people remain totally defenselessness against the divine designs of the dictator on duty. We carry with us the execrable consequences of massive social indoctrination, which will require the passing of more than a generation to overcome its imprint of immorality once freedom finally arrives. Society still lacks the vital independent mechanisms to seriously address the true aspirations of the Cuban people.

All this notwithstanding, there have been many messages of condolence from a wide range of political and religious figures including Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Frei Betto and Pope Francis. Other diverse figures include soccer star Diego Maradona, every leftist president from Latin America and King Felipe of Spain.

There will undoubtedly also be hundreds of condolences from all over the globe, from people of varied ancestries who nevertheless all have one thing in common: none have personally suffered the consequences of the Stalinist madness of the deceased.

None of these grieving mourners were the father of a young man who was shot. None were humiliated for a being believer or a homosexual and sentenced to hard labor in the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP). In fact, not one of them will even know what the UMAP was. None of them were forced to support their families on twenty dollars a month or experience the hell of a ration book.

None of these very disturbed friends of the dictator had family on the ’13 de Marzo’ tugboat; none was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison during the Black Spring; none has seen their mother, their wife or their daughter dragged by the fascists hordes during a march of the Ladies in White; none is a dissident besieged or beaten with impunity by the Cuban political police; none has been imprisoned for weeks or months without even knowing what charges are imputed to them, and then released without trial or further explanation; none has been expelled from their job due to political differences nor had a child expelled from their university career for the same reason.

None suffered a raid on their home without having engaged in punishable offenses; none has witnessed the degrading repudiation rallies organized by the political police and the Communist Party of its Commander-in-Chief against peaceful opponents. In short, none of them is surnamed Zapata, Payá, Boitel, Soto García, or Pollán.

If we accept the premise that since 1959 Cuba has been a one-party state —  and evidence indicates that the presidency of Raul Castro is in essence a continuation of the presidency of Fidel Castro — we can also assume with a high degree of certainty that the psychology of the regime is exactly the same as it has always been. This logically leads to the following question: Is there reason to hope that, if the sanctions were lifted, the military oligarchs would finally grant the Cuban people the rights outlined in the above-mentioned UN conventions, whose ratification and implementation by Cuba have been pending since February 2008?

Optimists would point to the reforms initiated by Raul, but anyone who takes a closer look at the so-called “transformations” would see that very few of them led to a practical, beneficial or immediate turnaround in the lives of Cubans inside or outside the country.

But if we approach this in good faith, we would have to acknowledge that some measures represent a more drastic and positive turnaround than others. Among them are the restoration of the right to travel overseas and authorization for private individuals to buy and sell their homes.

We cannot forget, however, that the 2013 emigration law stipulates that some professionals may not travel freely “in light of regulations aimed at preserving a qualified work force.”

Nor can we dismiss the fact that the Cuban government may also prevent persons from entering the country who have been accused of “organizing, encouraging, carrying out or participating in actions hostile to the Cuban state… when reasons of defense and national security so suggest;” or that the government may “bar entry into the country to those who have been declared undesirable or who have been expelled.” This makes clear just how wide a margin this delicious tool of coercion gives the repressors to maneuver.

In terms of the authorization to buy and sell houses, let us remember that this law is saddled with a series of burdensome regulations pertaining to sale prices that allow the government to meddle in something in which it has no business, a reminder that here nothing good ever lasts for very long.

However, a glance at the rest of the package does reveal a curious mindset in these so-called reforms. It is extremely difficult to accept the sincerity of the “authorization” to buy used cars when they are set at stratospheric prices; or the corrupt approach by the managements of new cooperative businesses when they remain subordinate to inefficient state enterprises; or the imposition of exorbitant taxes on private businesses when they are deprived of a wholesale commodity market; or all the limitations that have led to an obviously failed agricultural policy, to name a few

But more serious than these economic trifles is the persistence of repressive policies that continue to promote the duet between the Communist Party and State Security. From the offices of what is still the only legally recognized political party, they are still drafting tactics and strategies that will later be put into practice in the street by the political police’s henchmen.

Arbitrary arrests and the weakest of legal protections are persistent problems in Cuba in 2015. They are the bastard offspring that result when there is no separation of powers. Physical assaults and acts of repudiation are still being perpetrated with impunity while no one in authority can be bothered to intervene.

Government henchmen are ordered to stab opposition leaders and harass in broad daylight women who are carrying no weapons other than white gladiolas. An iron-fisted and absolute censorship of dissident thought persists while the regime continues to exercise a tight monopoly on the media and the press.

It still vetoes easy access to the internet, something now well-advanced in the second decade of the 21st century. We can therefore conclude that the changes that have been introduced in Cuba up to this point are insubstantial and of a purely cosmetic nature.

These military oddballs are no longer capable of offering up anything new, so it is only logical to question their good intentions for the future and their ability to conceive a plan for real prosperity, especially if the formula requires any change of course.

It remains to be seen whether these reforms reflect a sincere desire to open the door to a globalized economy for the Cuban people. It is more reasonable to assume that they amount an endless series of delaying tactics by the same old oligarchs to hold onto power.

But in the event that the international community, the Cuban people and the Cuban opposition decide to give them a vote of confidence, would this guarantee that the above-mentioned UN conventions would be ratified and implemented, and that this would result in a turn towards democracy?

In the light of psychological mindset thus far exhibited by the regime, logical reasoning would lead to the undeniable and unmistakable conclusion that this would never happen, that it would only result in a sudden transfusion to all the repressive resources of the regime and its receiving unwarranted international recognition.

There is no chance the Cuban government will become any more economically efficient, only that it can rely on having more resources to squander and more millions in its overseas accounts to feed its delusions of grandeur. Once a beast has tasted blood, nothing else will do.

And once liberated from these instruments of political pressure — and with the tacit international approval that this implies — an autocratic government like that of the Castros will never ratify the UN conventions. On the contrary, it will become even more vicious, as has already been made clear by its repression of dissidents from a comfortable and relaxed position.

History has definitively shown us that some people never change. Three decades of marriage to the Soviet Union demonstrated that the Cuban people were never the intended recipients of all that wealth. If it was not the case then, why would we suppose it would be any different now, especially after so many years of corrupt and lethargic governance?

Clearly, freedom in Cuba is not dependent on the actions of any foreign government. Instead, it depends on the courage and wisdom demonstrated by its people. But unconditionally accepting every international condition without the island’s people having to suffer, struggle or expect anything would not seem to necessarily be helpful.

2015 ends without there being the slightest indication of accommodation regarding our civil rights or of even something as basic as ratification of the aforementioned human rights conventions. In this context, making unconditional concessions to the totalitarian regime in Havana, just as Caracas is teetering on the brink, would be a strategic disaster for my people and would delay by several decades the arrival of democracy, for which as the Cuban nation has waited so long.

He would receive no financial support from his powerful son-in-law General Luis Alberto, nor from his little daughter Mariela, the Lady Di of CENESEX. So, amid his helplessness, he would be left if he dared with the consequences of the austerity always demanded by the Castro brothers for millions of Cubans but never for themselves.

Asking him to return to a certain lost village in east of the country [i.e. Biran, where he was born] would seem excessively cruel, so we would start by moving his residence from wherever he is, to some humble Havana neighborhood — for example Cerro, Marianao or Central Havana — and issue him a ration book, to which, of course, he would have every right in the world.

We would then sign him up for a succulent retirement check, let’s say 1,000 Cuban pesos a month — some $40 US — which would be five times what the average retired Cuban receives — some $8 US a month — and so, in this way, no one could accuse us of bad intentions.

At this point we would dissolve our undeserved fraternity, and from this moment would leave the man who is today the President of the Republic, at the mercy of this picturesque social environment that, for decades, has surrounded more than 90% of retired Cubans.

After several months of picking up his ration quota — six pounds of rice, a quarter pound of beans, some eggs, “chicken for fish”* and half a pound of oil a month — the ex-president’s palate would, gradually, forget the taste of beef filets, lobster, good caviar and those expensive wines that he acquired a taste for from his older brothers.

Given the high devaluation of the currency, his checkbook — due precisely to the erratic policies maintained by both dictators — would be empty after the first ten days each month and our retiree wouldn’t have a cent and would start to feel the full rigor of all the scarcities the rest of the retirees suffer just two or three days after they collect their money.

The ex-president would no longer have a cupboard filled with select supplies and would quickly become accustomed to seeing the monotonous landscape of nothing but frost in the empty freezer, and then he would confront, without resources, the merciless prices of the food markets and the brand new “TRDs” (literally: Hard Currency Collection Stores) which, thanks to the initiatives of the previous government — meaning: his — continue to exfoliate the wallets of the Cuban people.

He would no longer live amid comfortable air-conditioning, because it would consume more than half of his income, but instead he would hold onto some old repaired fan, and he would pray every day to the Virgin that it would not malfunction, and as for buying a second-hand car at one of the State agencies with prices fixed by the previous government — he would understand that it would take seventy years of his retirement income — assuming he didn’t eat, dress himself, buy shoes nor pay the electric bill. He would no longer have cars with full tanks of gas waiting at his door every day, and would be forced to travel using one of the worst systems of public transport in the world — one of the hot potatoes inherited by the following government.

Of course, after several months of poor nutrition, health problems would soon appear, but then the ex-president could no longer access the exclusive hospital known as CIMEQ, nor “La Pradera,” nor the Cira Garcia International Clinic — available almost exclusively to the upper crust and foreigners. But, with lots of luck, he would be admitted to some stinking room in a crumbling hospital, where there would be no shower nor working toilet, where he would have to bring his own sheets, and where there would be a scarcity of medicines and supplies to heal him. There he would be attended by doctors frustrated after decades of poverty-level wages and lack of personal expectations, but despite everything, these professionals would try to attend to his needs as well as the hostile environment would allow them to.

By then the retired General would have seen his desire to take a coveted tourist trip to Mexico go up in smoke for good. He would not be able to travel to that Aztec land nor any other, nor could he even reserve a room in the lowest category Cuban hotel at the risk of dying of hunger, because the previous government — that is, his — established that it would cost an entire monthly retirement check to stay just one night.

It goes without saying that by now our illustrious retiree would have been convinced that there is no sweet tamarind** nor dictatorship with any shame, but if he keeps quiet not out of common decency it will be so as not to expose himself to some of those shameful acts of repudiation that he still orders today, a risk that cannot be discarded now that his friend Furry is not long the Minister of the Interior.

However, at this moment if, out of mercy, one would give Raul Castro one piece of advice, it might be: Never sit in the warm sun at the end of the day at any peaceful Havana park along with other retirees because if the dictator showed up there — much to his disadvantage this title is usually lifelong — he would likely receive his own repudiation rally. He would know first hand, and not through cold police reports or insensitive functionaries, how much resentment and pain is harbored in these old hearts.

He would hear about the irremediable uprooting of their grandchildren, the youth now fleeing the tyranny in migratory waves across the Straits of Florida or through the Central American jungles, and he would hear, with absolute certainty, more than one story of dead rafters.

Only then, under the silence of those trees, would he perceive the tyranny in all its dimensions and how much hate is held by this betrayed generation that lost its dreams and its lives in the shadow of so much infamy.

Translator’s notes:
* A common expression in Cuba which indicates ration card holders “may” substitute chicken for their allotment of fish. As fish is virtually never available to ordinary people, the “may” makes it something of a joke.
**Jeovany is remaking an expression loosely related to the English expression: “The best X is a dead X.” Among the frequent examples found on-line is: “There is no good Communist, nor any sweet tamarind.” Other examples are commonly racist, homophobic, or other forms of hate speech.

Just because the dictatorship is exactly the same doesn’t mean that Cuba is. The political audacity of Obama in diametrically reversing a policy perpetuated by his nine predecessors in the White House is not the focus of this discussion, but the consequences of this shift are undoubtedly far-reaching.

This has obviously affected the political scene inside and outside of Cuba because in the short term it has conditioned a different attitude toward the island and has raised more expectations in the entrepreneurial sector of the informal Cuban economy.

Because a country is the sum of the needs and aspirations of the people who inhabit it, something well-known to Bergoglio, an expert on human nature, he must have opted for prudence out of the conviction that it was the appropriate thing right now.

Let’s put everything in context. Bergoglio is a Pope who has publicly agreed to mediate one of the longest and most bitter conflicts in modern history, and therefore follows the golden rule of all mediators: do not embarrass any party taking a neutral position. He knows that the world is watching his every gesture.

He also knows the penchant of the Cuban side to concoct absurd pretexts, and he knows that any confrontational statement could cool the climate of the current negotiations. At this time the pope is a political actor and conducts himself as such.

In Cuba we saw a Bergoglio focused on his purpose of bringing the two parties closer to try to resolve a longtime dispute. We are in the presence a man in the prime of his personal maturity and at the summit of his life’s work, conscientiously serving in a delicate negotiation.

Like any good politician, who never sacrifices the final objective for intermediate skirmishes, he simply puts his mission ahead of any personal opinion he may have on the matter and keeps his attention fixed on achieving the goal.

Nevertheless, his personal visit to Fidel Castro was disconcerting—he was not required by protocol to visit someone who at this point does not occupy any official positions. If instead he had not visited Fidel’s home, he would have sent a clear political message about his desire to break with a past that Cuba urgently needs to leave behind. But for either practical or purely personal reasons he chose to give a media selfie to the dictatorship.

Seeing him with the man who has most damaged the Cuban nation has been deeply disturbing, but time will unveil the true intention of his encounter and only then will we know how ethically justified his decision was.

Controversies have also arisen about his later statements denying knowledge of the arrests of hundreds of Cuban dissidents during his stay on the island. But not meeting with any dissidents fit pragmatically with his objective when seen from the viewpoint of a mediator: this would have unduly strained the climate of the visit, in the view of the Cuban government—and is something, by the way, that was not required given the essentially pastoral character of his tour. Viewing everything in this light, it was simply a diplomatic matter of refraining from making inflammatory statements.

But all this made more evident still the dilemma of the Cuban Catholic Church; caught between the brittle pride of a suspicious dictatorship and hurting those who are supposed to be its people has presented a profound ethical dilemma.

We are facing a new scenario in which age-old questions are repeated: what is the role of the Catholic Church, located between a suffering people and the despotism of their oppressors? Where is her exact place in this puzzle of contradictions? To what extent should the successor of Peter be politically involved? Or maybe the question is much simpler still—Which side would Jesus be on at this crossroads of our history?

At this time Francis, who delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly in keeping with his style, has opted not to take a risk regarding Cuba, has decided to dance to the rhythm of his own tango, and from the stairway seemed to sing “goodbye children!” as one who knows all the answers beforehand.