14ymedio, Pedro Campos, Havana, 28 October 2016 – Launching an advertising campaign, deploying a costly diplomatic action charged to the Cuban people against a “blockade” that doesn’t have a single opponent in the United Nations, because even the United States government abstained, is at the very least to make yourself a laughingstock to the world.
This happens when politics is not structured based on rational thought, nor even on your own interests, but on the remains of pride, madness and fear.
We discover, one more time, that this campaign is directed against the Cuban people whom it tries to continue to disinform and shut up with nonsense seeking justifications for suicidally clinging to obsolete methods and ideas, superseded by history, even at the cost of international credibility.
The world doesn’t care about fidelismo, about the Castro regime. It is demonstrably tired of it. The regime’s goal is to maintain power within. An absolute power that makes room for any nonsense, so corrupt is it, so addicted and brutish.
The US government’s intelligent abstention in the periodic vote in the UN General Assembly on the American embargo on Cuba, left the Cuban government, as we say colloquially, with the rifle on its shoulder ready to swing at a ball that hasn’t been pitched, or falling under the cannon fire of a ghost ship on the high seas.
Now how are they going to keep blaming Obama and his government for the permanence of some strings of the blockade (as the Cuban government likes to calls it), or the embargo (as it is, in fact).
The overwhelming media and mobilizing campaign against the “blockade” reached its zenith on the eave of the UN vote on the repeated Castro regime proposal stating the “need to put an end to the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”
Cuba’s press organs spent several days trying to demonstrate that the blockade-embargo is the cause of all our ills. For weeks, the repudiation rallies have been unending in work and study centers, led by the likes of television talking-head Randy Alonso, against a policy that never diminished one iota the well-being of the political elite and which, instead, has served to justify its disasters, repressions and phobias toward democracy.
People, meanwhile, play at the Soviet era game in Russia: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Which translated in this context would mean something like “they try to deceive us and we let them think we believe them so they’ll leave us alone.”
If anything has demonstrated once again how useful fidelismo is in maintaining what is left of the embargo, it is precisely this beardless social mobilization to entertain people and the rigged domestic measures to counter the “imperialist penetration,” which at any particular moment they identify with the policies approved by the last congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) regarding self-employment, cooperatives and foreign investments.
The policy of rapprochement with the United States, developed in the last years of the Obama administration, which has been taking steps since the last Bush administration, has reached the reestablishment of relations, the signing of several presidential orders modifying nearly everything that is not codified by Congress, and even the visit of the US president to Cuba, whose people did not hide their joy at possibly the most momentous visit by a head of state in the last half century.
The US president has been very clear: he wants to live the blockade, but it doesn’t depend on him. He is doing everything he can to dismantle it from the office of the president. It’s clear that he would like a democratic government in Havana with whom the US would have better relations, but he does not intend to meddle in Cuban affairs. He said this in Cuba: this is a matter for Cubans.
But it doesn’t matter, the campaign against the blockade will continue. Fidelismo cannot live without enemies, and even though the adversary vows, promises and acts constructively, he must continue to be blamed for all wrongs and his “fifth column” must be repressed. If not, on whom is going to fall the historic blame for the disaster? Because history “must absolve” it*.
Fidel’s war against the windmills will continue.
*Translator’s note: A phrase taken from Fidel Castro’s defense in court (according to a version later published by he himself) for the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks, which is considered the start of the Revolution that ultimately triumphed in 1959: “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”
