Recurring Arguments / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

Image downloaded from the site: jorgegamezusa.blogspot.com

Cuba’s elderly leaders must be celebrating, because once again their Cuban-American adversaries in the U.S. Congress have served up to them, on a golden platter, the old, spruced-up reasons that provide their cadres and officials the banquet of arguments with which they justify and “feed” the rigidity of the model. It’s the recurring, long-distance slap from the extremists under a fossilized policy which hasn’t worked, which is almost 53 years old, and which even so they refuse even to reconsider for the welfare of Cuban society.

On December 13 the front page of the daily Granma informed us that the United States Congress was considering a bill which would again restrict travel by Americans and Cuban-Americans to our archipelago, as well as remittances to Cuba. The article cites the Chicago Tribune and points out that the initiative is sponsored by Mario Díaz-Balart, a Republican representative for the state of Florida. It goes on to say that the measure is intended “to reinstate the restrictions approved during the George W. Bush administration, such as a single trip every three years for Cuban-Americans for the purposes of ‘family reunions’ and a limit of $1200 per year on remittances”, and that the relaxing of the sanctions approved by President Barack Obama would be annulled ipso facto. It is a strategy designed to slam the doors on any possibility of dialogue, instead of extending a hand in national reconciliation.

Some time ago, in these parts, the country’s leadership announced — among the timid reforms they inserted due to the burden of the disaster that is rotting Cuba — the abolition of the exit visa and the facilitation of travel for Cuban émigrés to our common home. In the measures announced most recently they have neither commented nor legislated on the matter. I don’t know if they’ll be supported given this senile strategy which divides and serves both sides so that they can defend their respective territories and rhetoric. I will go on defending the truth, and as in a game of dominoes, I choose a third position so as not to be a wild card for either faction; I pound the table and act in accordance with what I consider best for the Cuban nation: Stop bickering!

Translated by: Adam Cooper

December 20 2011