The Inebriated Pupil / 14ymedio, Eliecer Avila

Screen shot of the Cuban television program 'The Amazed Pupil’ directed by Iroel Sanchez.
Screen shot of the Cuban television program ‘The Amazed Pupil’ directed by Iroel Sanchez.

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Eliecer Avila, Havana, 14 December 2015 – The Astonished Pupil is a recent program on Cuban TV directed by Iroel Sanchez. The show continues the logic that has characterized Sanchez in recent years. Every time the gentleman opens his mouth it is to speak badly of everything modern, free and useful, from the internet and Facebook to denouncing “the great lie represented by Western democracy.” It seems that he and his friends know best about another world of which they don’t have the vaguest positive memory.

Continuing in this theme, his media program has a chaotic script, tries to mix entertainment with the most leftist of propaganda, and broadcasts materials such as speeches by radical separatists in Catalonia.

The strangest thing about it is that it is presented as something new and accepted without question, when enough time has passed that all these arguments have been profoundly dismantled by excellent political and intellectual analysis, demonstrating the lack of both logic and principles in such positions and their manipulated reasoning.

Today they presented a documentary called something like “Modern Slaves,” a phrase that refers to almost everyone on the planet, according to Sanchez, who believes that representative democracy and respect for human rights and the natural laws of markets are the most effective way to achieve development.

The voiceover narrating the materials appears to come from someone who has drunk disproportionate amounts of alcohol mixed in every possible variation and without eating any food. There is no other way in which a human being could affirm so much nonsense all at the same time.

It is precisely the freedom of expression achieved with these “slave societies” which allows any failure to make a “documentary” with his very particular vision of the world and to broadcast it, so that later on someone else can come along and use it against a country deprived of the opportunity to access YouTube and choose what they like and discard the rest.

The program offers the example of Ada Colau, a woman who became known for her activism against evictions in Spain and was elected mayor of Barcelona. It is a perfect example of Colau’s good luck to live in an “evil Western democracy,” because if she lived in the Cuban paradise, instead of important responsibilities and recognition, she would have received only kicks in the butt right up to today and called a CIA agent and counterrevolutionary for defending the rights of thousands of eastern Cubans fleeing poverty to settle in makeshift neighborhoods in Havana, who are treated inhumanely in many cases, despite having small children and being vulnerable.

It is a shame and untenable that works consistent with our reality are censored – works produced by Cuban theater directions, filmmakers, documentarians and writers – while television time is given over to programs paid for by public funds produced by these people who over and over again sell these same ideologies of eternal failure.

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Editor’s note: The author is president of the movement Somos+ (We are more)