Cristina Escobar’s Stupid Performance Before Cuban President Diaz-Canel / Jeovany Jimenez Vega

Jeovany Jimenez Vega, Ciudadano Cero, 31 August 2021 — Prefabricated speeches, like the one from Cristina Escobar to Mr. Handpicked [Cuban president Díaz-Canel] on August 19th — in a delayed transmission prudently edited by Cuban TV —  always drip the same deceit: the minutes fly by and you only hear the nonsense surrounding the edges of the wound, without ever getting to the centre of the ulcer, always carefully avoiding key ideas and words.

That is precisely the pathognomonic sign which points them out and exposes them as vulgar stupidities, and so we listened to this brand new “social communicator” say “government” instead of “regime,”  for example, or use the euphemistic “construction of omissions” to refer to the dreadful censorship imposed since forever by Castroism: bread should be called bread, and dictatorship dictatorship!

The pathetic nerve of a Miss Escobar making out it is all the plain truth when she then goes off on tangents, and not calling things by their proper names. Although there were other speeches, Escobar’s contained some real gems, for example, when she recognised that in Castroism’s Cuba “… any nobody can run the press …” and that the Communist Party leaders have always been “… deciding how to say things…” 

To put it more simply; she recognised that the official press in Cuba has as its ultimate aim washing the dirty laundry of its lying political demagogues — what a sacrilege to say that in this land of spotless leaders! — and ultimately to promote that “… place under siege mentality …”, that perpetual justification for the regime’s repressive practice sadly displayed in all its cruelty during a historic 11th of July [a day of protests against the Cuban government] which, as Escobar recognises, was Olympically ignored by the stupid press.

Miss Escobar will know that if her tambourine journalism didn’t bother to cover 11th of July, it was because it preferred to give in to its masters and turn its back on the people at the precise moment when they most needed it. At the exact minute when her “journalists” accepted, as the most natural thing, to guard the ICRT building (Cuban Institute of Radio & TV) from a hypothetical attack which never happened — since the people didn’t start any violence —  another much rougher building called the Cuban Nation collapsed under the seismic shock of its people across the whole length of this ruined country. Therefore, when those “communication professionals”, displaying their proverbial cowardice, buried their heads in the sand to avoid having to report the unpublished protests of the people demonstrating their contempt for the tyrants, they betrayed the very essence of their profession and renounced the opportunity of their lives to vindicate themselves after such disloyalty.

But no-one can deny our legitimate right to defence so, there, where the official press didn’t dare to go, the people’s reporting did go and recorded its priceless testimony in thousands of photos and videos which bore witness to the energy of this sea of humanity and also the brutality with which they were opposed, to smother their cry. Hence the indignation at the sugar-coatings of this naive lady when she called them “…terrible images…” — another euphemism to avoid saying brutal repression — to the disturbing repression: the heartbreaking cry of impotence and pain of a people who resisted solely with reason and naked fists against the brutality unleashed by the hordes. But her cynicism reached its lowest point when this chameleonic diva purported, with total unscrupulousness, to make out to be heroes the cowards who maliciously beat with impunity, who kicked, tortured and locked up the tens of thousands of young people that memorable 11th of July.

Such subservience is scandalous. When even the ones who should, in theory, denounce and condemn those who were guilty of the massacre, settle for complicity by appearing as fools in the farce, they completely confirm a couple of certainties: that the Day of National Dignity was, for the history of Cuba, the point of no return which closed once and for all any possibility of an authentic dialogue with the dictatorship, and which, in its fight for freedom, our people can only count on the one authentic journalism in Cuba today, the independent journalists, who every day risk their skin, their liberty, and their life in the street struggling through wind and rain, in an unfair fight, in order that the truth may come out into the light against the defamations of these circus bootlickers whose faces the people will remember tomorrow.

This grotesque mise-en-scene saw the irreconcilable antagonism between the rights of my people and the dirty interests of the dictatorship; in the end it was clear that the Havana establishment will only “enter a dialogue”  if they can choose whom they talk to, decide what topics they fancy, and up to what point the conversation can go, always on their own terms and so long as their position of power is not brought into question. This is a valuable definitive lesson for all those last-minute upstart “dialoguers” who, inside and outside Cuba, still dream of the impossible from Castroism.

Translated by GH