The hope for a better world was dashed, only fear remained
14ymedio, Pedro Corzo, Miami. 5 January 2024 — I remember as if it were today, the first of January 1959 and the days that followed. I had just turned 16 and there was a collective hysteria, as best described by the journalist and historian Enrique Encimosa in the documentary Al Filo del Machete, produced by Pedro Suarez Tintín and Luis Diaz, and by the writer Jose Antonio Albertini in his most recent publication Memoria Constante: Relatos verídicos.
At the end of 1958, the premiere of the film The Bridge Over the River Kwai was scheduled to take place at El Cloris, the most modern cinema in Santa Clara.
I don’t think there were any movie-goers in those days. Various rebel groups attacked the city, taking the war to the streets, although I do remember that a few months later the cinema and the building that housed it, the Grand Hotel, the tallest building in the interior of the country, were confiscated by the revolution.
The former owner, Orfelio Ramos, was an entrepreneur, as dictator Miguel Diaz-Canel likes to say, who had made his fortune renting out bicycles and driving local buses with such spirit and talent that he became the owner of the buses that provided urban service in the city of Santa Clara.
Most of the population participated in that carnival that mixed hope for some and fear for others.
Hysteria had gripped both men and women. To my knowledge, the majority of the population participated in that carnival that mixed hope for some and fear for others. In the end, the ironclad social control established by Fidel and Raúl Castro terrorized the population in a framework of colossal inefficiency that has led the country to unprecedented spiritual and material misery.
The hope for a better world was dashed, and only fear remained. These contrary feelings were the result of the fanaticism of a few who, by standing out in the revolutionary whirlwind, were the protagonists of a sectarianism that was difficult to free themselves from, even if they had revolutionary credentials, as happened to the insurrectional leader Pedro Barata, a political prisoner for many years, when he testified before some thugs that the person they accused was innocent.
I remember a Castro slogan that said more or less it doesn’t matter what you did, but what you are doing, a clear message to the new and future accomplices of the destruction of the Republic that we lost.
The tension in society grew stronger every day because the arbitrary arrests and the roar of the firing squad frightened and deafened us. Arrests based on mere suspicions or unfounded accusations of collaboration with the overthrown regime were factors that encouraged opportunists or the most fearful to become accusers before the revolutionary courts, which did not seek justice but cruel revenge, concealed in a spurious judicial process.
The Revolution as a source of law, a pronouncement by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Republic, as Dr. Ramón Barquín explained in a recent article, gave the coup de grace to civility, including the conversion of the media, even the private ones, into instruments of a thunderous propaganda that confused the citizenry beyond description, a citizenry that was gradually but constantly being transformed into a mass at the service of the Castros and a criminal accomplice.
The massive confiscation of property, without judicial process, deprived many people of well-earned family fortunes.
On the other hand, the massive confiscation of property, without judicial process, deprived many people of well-earned family patrimonies. A Ministry for the Recovery of Misappropriated Property was hastily created, appointing incompetent administrators who destroyed the properties, a kind of precursor to the nouveau riche of today, children of the moncadistas, who today enjoy the power and wealth that their parents and grandparents appropriated.
Days and nights passed by, accumulating 66 years. Many have been accomplices of Castro’s totalitarianism. The regime has not lacked executioners who, even if they have not fired a rifle at a fellow human being, are accomplices of the numerous deaths and sufferings endured by the population.
However, to the satisfaction of men and women of dignity, there has been no shortage of compatriots willing to face the disgrace of Castroism with the painful consequences of exile, prison and firing squad, not to mention the internal exile in which many compatriots live, who, for various reasons, remain on the Island.
I am sure that Cuba and the Cubans will be free, but justice must be sought for this vast devastation of 66 years of terror.
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