The Leaked Video, Money Laundering and the CIA / Reinaldo Escobar

It was the 1970’s when the idea of “ideological diversionism” told hold in Cuba. Falling under this cumbersome epithet were Eurocommunism, the Beatles, poetry and long hair. The accusation was enough to lead to partisan prosecutions, purges in the universities, and even legal manuals. Eventually the fever subsided and in recent years it’s been talked about as if it were a childhood disease.

“Diversionism” could alternately be defined as a tendency to divert attention from the principal theme in order to distract one’s opponent and surprise him with a crushing blow. Boxers, lawyers, soldiers, everyone who has an adversary they want to confuse, they all know this. In this sense, any trick is lawful–even if it appears dirty–if it’s applied to the enemy.

After a close look at the latest video “leaked” from some corner of the official government, where a young man with pretensions to expertise lies to a group of high officials in the Ministry of the Interior, I get the impression that something very strange is happening “up there.”

How can you explain this effort to fool those who must know, better than anyone, the identity of their adversary? I could understand the speaker’s explications if his audience was composed of a group of foreign correspondents in Cuba. Meaning I could understand it, though I could not accept it from an ethical point of view.

Whether he lied on his own initiative out a desire for notoriety and wanting to appear talented and indispensable before his bosses, or if he lied to satisfy the strict demands of a dark hand, I can’t tell. But I know he’s lying. I know. The alternative Cuban blogosphere is not a creation of U.S. imperialism, but the fruit of a conjunction of factors among which are the failure of the socialist system, public discontent — especially among young people — and the worldwide development of technology.

The many awards received by the blogger Yoani Sánchez between 2008 and 2011 can not be interpreted as a money laundering operation orchestrated by the U.S. government. Perhaps someone of moderate intelligence could be made to believe that a band of CIA agents has specialized in bribing and intimidating dozens of people: Members of juries for the Ortega y Gasset Prize jury in Spain; the BOBs in Germany, the Maria Moors Cabot prize from Columbia University in the United States; the Prince Claus award from the Netherlands; and most recently the Jaime Brunet award from the University of Navarra and the iRedes in Burgos, also in Spain. But I doubt it.

And among whom have they distributed the supposed high technology satellite equipment mentioned in the presentation? Is it possible that State Security doesn’t know how bloggers, independent journalists and opponents of every stripe connect to the Internet?

It frightens me to think that the institutions charged with ensuring the security of the nation are being entertained in this way. Could it be they are preparing a coup d’etat, plotting an invasion from abroad, or something no one has even thought of? If this so-called “computer police” conference was not purely for amusement, then what was it for?

Translated from an article in Diario de Cuba.

9 February 2011