14ymedio, Pedro Corzo, Miami, 18 February 2023 — We often read about that particularly predatory human subspecies that we call “coyotes,” unscrupulous subjects who live from the despair of those who seek to have a better life for themselves and theirs.
These people have no mercy. They traffic people, making them face countless dangers, like being kidnapped, raped or killed. It’s a dirty international business of billions of dollars in which organized crime has a great participation, an entity present in more than one government in the hemisphere.
It is prudent to wonder if that activity was in principle an invention of criminal-minded governments or simple criminals who are always looking for a greater fortune. The question is a consequence of the recent decision of the Nicaraguan dictatorship to banish 222 political prisoners, an act that confirms that the tyrants of Castro-Chavismo do not even respect their own laws.
This release of political prisoners to obtain some political or economic benefit was a practice that Fidel Castro instituted in the 1960s, when he put a price on the head of each and every one of the prisoners of the 2506 Brigade*. Later, every time an influential U.S. senator traveled to Cuba and interceded for a prisoner, the dictator released some of his slaves. The same happened with the few Ibero-American political leaders who were interested in those who were in the Caribbean tyrant’s dungeons. Even the Nobel Gabriel García Márquez was rewarded by his friend Castro with a slave, the already disappeared political prisoner Reinol González.
Castro-Chavista regimes dictate particularly repressive laws whose direct results are death or imprisonment and, nevertheless, they break them extremely easily if there is any benefit involved, because all those dictators share the greed of coyotes.
Of course, these exiles, in addition to looking for economic benefits, have political gains in their sights. The Ortega-Murillo duo seeks, with the banishment of political prisoners, an approach to the government of President Joe Biden, who apparently, as former President Barack Obama did, is in favor of a rapprochement with the despots that prevail in the hemisphere, perhaps with the naive idea that the bad guys give in to good examples.
Political prisoners are a by-product of repression, the greatest hallmark of Castro-Chavism. To achieve absolute social control, punishment is essential. That’s why in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia there are political prisoners who in most cases have not committed any crime; they have been punished for the right to think and give their opinion without hypocrisy, a crime for the autocrats who govern those countries.
The worst thing is that they use repression as an instrument of punishment, in addition to simulating changes. These regimes condemn a large number of people for no reason with the aim of breaking them, sometimes releasing them en masse and banishing them, in order to receive benefits from the government that welcomes them or, at least, making “useful idiots” think that the dictatorship is changing by exiling prisoners who did not commit crimes, as the writer José Antonio Albertini said.
The best evidence of this statement dates back to the arrival in Spain of several prisoners of Cuba’s 2003 Black Spring, something similar to what Ortega-Murillo did. On that occasion, Member of the European Parliament María Muñiz, of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, told Deutsche Welle: “We must appreciate this gesture of Cuba,” adding, “this will allow the European Union’s Common Position towards Cuba to be changed in the near future,” ignoring that the prisoners were unjustly sanctioned, as is the case with the banished.
It is not fair that tyrants are rewarded for rectifying their crimes. The Iranian autocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pardoned prisoners for the protests that motivated the murder of the young Mahsa Amini and, according to some rumors, the Cuban regime will release some of the protestors arrested on July 11, 2021. These injustices should not be rewarded by democratic governments by declaring that there are changes and granting benefits, when the dictatorship is actually preparing the prisons to receive new innocents.
*Translator’s note: The 2506 Brigade was made up of Cuban exiles, and in 1961 they landed at the Bay of Pigs [known as Giron in Cuba] to overthrow Fidel Castro.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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