Recently, the official media made public the Cuban government’s mediation in the dialogue process between the Colombian narco-trafficking guerrillas known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government of that nation.
It would really be desirable that, at last, a dialogue process restored peace in Colombia after decades of guerrilla violence and organized drug trafficking from a guerrilla army that transitioned from Marxism to the control of the cocaine cartel. I suppose that some day a book will have to be written about the strange mutations of Marxism in the postmodern era.
At any rate, it is not coincidental that the Cuban government, unable to talk with Cuban civil society, has undergone a year of secret meetings as an intermediary of the FARC, an armed force it trained, supported, and supplied with weapons over the years, since that time when F. Castro was a champion of American freedom and sought to export his communist revolution throughout the region. The Cuban government’s share of the responsibility in the decades of violence that Colombia has endured brands it a creditor of that nation’s peace.
This mediation has most likely not been very spontaneous. For sure, it is not the way out once conceived by the guerrilla sponsors, but it is also certain that the Cuban leadership will have redirected its interests in this matter … as in all cases. There is some secret official agenda, no doubt about that.
It is clear that the weakening of FARC, thanks to actions initiated and developed under President Alvaro Uribe, with the support of the U.S. government, has forced it to appeal to talks with the government of Juan Manuel Santos, even when actions against the narco-guerrillas have remained strong, and devastating blows have been scored in sympathy with the President’s clear statement that “There will be no ceasefire of any kind, and we won’t have anything until we arrive at a final agreement, let’s make that very clear…”
Thus, although the Cuban media aired a video showing the FARC Central Control Commander boasting: “we said we were going to win and we will win”, the truth is that they are being defeated by the Colombian regular army and police. In the face of this, it is possible that, in the short or medium term, the expansion of the last Castro bastion in this hemisphere will disappear, and with it, another one of the messianic hallucinations of F. Castro will have ended and be deemed a failure. In a few years, the last shreds of the communist revolution that the Orate of Birán dreamed up will be gone, and Colombia will have overcome the last traces of so much violence.
It won’t be so in Cuba, where Cubans who aspire to democratic changes lack the political will of the government to negotiate and establish an end to the national crisis. As for the rest, it is clear that the olive green command is not interested in talking with pacifists but with narco-traffickers. Things of my country.
Translated by Norma Whiting
September 7 2012
