When speaking of the children, grandchildren and relatives of the top leaders of the Party, State, and the Revolutionary government, we must be careful. All too often we tend to generalize, and even to discriminate, repeating phrases like “Daddy’s little children are all crackpots.” But it is not always true.
It is true, to the point that it has become cliché, that power degrades and corrupts. But it is also well known that stopping it makes life a spa concept pleasant and relaxing.
Mariela and Alejandro Castro, for example, feel like patriotic symbols. We could fill whole pages describing these siblings. She terrified of being ridiculed, he devoted to his parents, both obsessive beings who know how to use their modesty and humility as a hammer and chisel to carve their monolithic pedestal. Let us comment on them, but also on others who have been stigmatized out of jealousy, mysterious wiles, or personal sympathy, such as Ernesto Guevara March, who deserves my love.
It is not interesting to me to feed resentments and frustrations, we have enough of this. Nor do I try to mount the pulpit to pontificate, my idea is far from wielding a dark sharpened scythe and with it to decapitate anyone who smells of the stink of the Central Committee. I prefer to demystify and demonstrate, to the darkest or most brilliant members of a nocturnal fauna whom some shoddy philosophers call “semen of the ruling class” and they don’t appear in social magazines because in Havana they still don’t exist.
Being a daddy’s boy generates popularity, greases certain mechanisms that otherwise would rust, but that caste, casual and crystalline in view, also shares intrigues and frustrations.
Let’s talk about that, and everything. I suggest even interacting to satisfy our questions about a group descended from the country’s “pristine” leaders, who breakfast on moral slogans, snack on equalitarianism, and dine on ethical principles. You write to me, ask what you want, of whom you want, and I, doing my best, will fire off a tirade. But remember, it is not my attention to spit out tired lies: theories end when testing begins.
March 13 2012
