It is a crime to manipulate a child’s conscience for the adulation of a dictator.
Cubanet, Miriam Celaya, 15 August 2016, Havana – This Saturday, August 13, 2016, was the culmination of true torture after months of putting up with the fanfare in the official media on the occasion of the ninetieth birthday of the Specter-in-Chief.
Against any reasonable forecast, the responsibility for the birthday celebration was delegated to the members of the children’s art troupe “La Colmenita,” (The Little Beehive) and was presented to an audience that was beyond unusual: a theater crowded with adults dressed in military accoutrements or in pressed white guayaberas, Cuban dress shirts.
In the front row, flanked by the president of Venezuela on his left and his brother Raúl Castro on his right, the Orate Magnus in the flesh writhed in his seat and turned to whisper something to the Venezuelan catafalque, without paying much attention to the apotheosis of bad taste that was taking place on stage. Undaunted and haughty, as he has always been, he remained indifferent to the adulation, as if the whole deployment of major sucking-up were not exclusively devoted to him and his irreparable 90 years.
However, it this upside-down granddaddy, to whom the children narrated stories, is not what this commentary is about, but specifically about the child actors who were charged with the responsibility for the pathetic spectacle, whose most salient feature was a waste of a repulsive cult towards the ancient dictator.
An alienated representation of Abdala, José Martí’s well-known theater piece, where the hysteria and the over-acting of the two young performers stood out in stark contrast to the firm, serene and happy mood behind this work of Martí, was the strong dish that attempted to draw a parallel line between the hero of the play–young Abdala marching off to war—and Cuba’s ex-chief.
Meanwhile, the girl in the role of the mother of Patriot Abdala rendered herself on the stage with the same deranged passion of a slum tango, to the delight of all spectators… except one. Poor children, victims of the political manipulations of their elders! Poor Martí, so used and abused by the power of a satrapy that has turned Cuba into exactly the opposite of what he dreamed of!
Meanwhile, on the backdrop, images from the Wars of Independence were projected, followed by other, real ones, of the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra, the Bay of Pigs battle and the thousand useless fights tussled by the ex-Undefeated from his climate-controlled headquarters. The same ossified scheme of the aesthetics of socialist realism rooted in the years of the Cold War. The consecration of mediocrity.
And just in case the show wasn’t tasteless enough, the City Historian and a decrepit Omara Portuondo were brought onto the stage. In a shaky voice, Portuondo sang (again!), “The era is giving birth to a heart.” Castro I sat in an armchair because his dreadful state of health no longer allows those incendiary speeches standing on his feet before the public. The City Historian, one of the most notorious pimps of Castro I, made a grotesque and vulgar tribute praising the culture and genius of the nonagenarian honoree, his astonishing knowledge, his aptitude for speaking (and supposedly also “for listening”), the beauty of his hands and that “Fidel” had given him a tie 20 years ago.
The children’s feigned passion, the fake joy of the director and the artificial rigidity of the public provoked embarrassment among the rest of the people, but it especially arouses indignation to note how brainwashed these children are. Their carefully learned scripts, their acting gestures, the projection of their voices; everything indicates thorough indoctrination, long hours snatched from the play and joy of that brief period of their lives, to be submitted to obedience and sacrifice in order to satisfy the vanity of the old tyrant.
The U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of the Child should condemn this practice as a criminal violation, suitable to Nazism, to manipulate the conscience of defenseless children in serving the ideological interests of adults.
The children arouse pity. In a not-too-distant day, when the revered specter of today is just a bad memory next to a pile of ashes, they will discover that they were used in the service of an outdated ideology and that their candor was sacrificed at the foot of a statue of the past, with the willing consent of those who should protect them: their parents. I would like to think that at least the children will have the opportunity to change course.
Translated by Norma Whiting
