Cuba: For 53 years the paper supports everything they write / Angel Santiesteban

The most official newspaper, the voice of the only political party in Cuba, is cynical enough to publish an article entitled: “The dark side of democracy,” by the “journalist” and Bolivian university “professor,” national “Senator” for the Socialist Movement party (MAS), “former director”of the weekly “Here” and former candidate in 2002 for vice president of Bolivia with coca grower Evo Morales, Antonio Peredo Leigue, who begins by quoting the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Language Academy, in its two meanings of the word “democracy.”

Then, ignoring our geographical position, because by saying: “I will not mention any examples of Our America, where everyone feels acutely the critical need to dissect what happens in each of our countries,” he loses the social sense of what happens in Cuba.

So we infer that he Olympically ignores Cubans who for over fifty years have not the least rights (according to the dictionary) to comment, disagree, criticize or complain, about what happens in our country, for what the “journalist” shows a total ignorance of the circumstances in which we live the on this island. And if his intention was to include us in the continent, we who do not really have our place in the Western Hemisphere, than any of the residents in Cuba who provides critical testimony to the system sinks into the most extreme of the absurd circumstances overcoming, even, the Kafkaesque occurrences, we have only neighbors, on this imaginary and marginal planet, in North Korea and China. So, definitely, Mr. Journalist who published that article in the newspaper Granma, you did not take us into account.

But all this, according to the journalist, is to make a scapegoat of the European Union, hence the publication of the communist libel, although it’s clear that the regime’s censors did not read line by line, or perhaps their attitude reaffirms what we have known for a long time: that faced with such a disadvantage in international public opinion, they have lost all shame, and the only thing that matters is trying to manipulate the people of Cuba, although they don’t manage it, because the silence of its citizens is the response of fear, and the officialdom is committed to that.

Later, the columnist says, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, clearly and promptly, the right to life and decent work for all people in all countries. This is the foundation of democracy. In some countries it is more problematic than in others to fulfill that statement. “

If the journalist had written this piece in Cuba, they certainly would not have published it in any media, because it is too ambiguous, too close to the demands of Cuban dissidents. It would have certainly suffered censorship and ideological position would have been challenged, as all are obliged to think uniformly, and although they do not, most of them fake it.

For us, if demand the same, we are branded as traitors, spies, we are in collusion with the enemy they choose, they fabricate. Surely, such a journalist, with his ideas, would be part of those persecuted by and inquisitive government machinery of the Castro brothers.

With pleasure we would explain this to all those foreigners who distort the Cuban reality; although I still doubt that they can be as innocent, or simply bought off with some with a benefit paid to them by the Cuban regime, not always with money; the most common bribes to intellectuals and journalists, those of the “Left”, are often invitations to the island with all expenses paid.

February 25 2012