Look at Me, Miami and, If You Value Your Death, Don’t Cry / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Alan Gross, like every North American who comes in contact with the Castro regime and defends it even from within a captivity of little lies — attacking his own government with million-dollar demands — is a bad man. Gross’s little suicide threats, his lack of solidarity with Cubans in exile and civil society on the Island, his backward religiosity of psalms and miracle-mongering, his complicit silence as to the assassinations committed by the Castro regime while he was supposedly in prison, his lawyer subsidized by Havana, his support of the lifting of an embargo that had not appeared to be his concern when he was contracted by USAID, his servile flattery of President Obama, his admiring loyalty to the sacrosanct balls of Raúl, his suspicious loss of dentition at the record pace of one tooth per year, his (and his wife’s) insipid leftist pose, in short, what a fossil, what fealty, what Submerged States of Fidelity…

Meanwhile, the triumphal return to the Island of the 5 deadly spies, with their muscles worthy of hand-to-hand combat, their vacant stares of those who know themselves to be puppets of a dismal power that can pulverize them at any time, with their exaggerated dentitions, surrounded by a people who for decades have not been even plebes, a perverse and impoverished populace, terrified in their fear that swings from meanness to mediocrity, jabbering with the neighbors in a language that we free Cubans do not know because it is a jargon of the stable, of the State.

My Fellow Cubans, let us not kid ourselves. The stupidity of our country can be reined-in by taking advantage of this umpteenth criminal juncture in our history. We will never live in liberty. The Earth is cursed against our volatile beauty. The race that inhabits the Island is infected and cannot be decontaminated. The lucid ones, the virtuous ones, escape without ever looking over their shoulders, or else they will pay the brave price of being martyrs killed in cold blood, like the holy souls Laura Pollán and Oswaldo Payá.

The stampede cannot be stopped now in Miami. It is too late for us to remain so close to evil. We must run away, further and further to the north of the world. Throughout generations upon generations, the Castroites have become millionaires in South Florida. Castroism is the factual and media-conscious law in the Cuban exile community. It is the majority. The Cuban-American sensibility in itself is an insular invention: with that nostalgia bent-over and submissive to a frigid Fidelism, with that vernacular that sounds taken out of Google Talk, with those gold trinkets of 19.59 carats and eyebrows groomed to delirium. Please.

The legislators of Florida count for nothing. What does rule is the corrupting power of the mafias that Fidel has institutionalized in Miami, from the church to the academy, from the marinas to the slaughterhouses, from the swamp to the cane field, from the airport to its horrendous museums and mausoleums, with their fairs and their colleges and their constant kitsch, from the restaurants to the Revolution itself.

Miami has made its best effort, but today Miami is millions of Alan Grosses and Five Heroes. Forget all that about them being spies, My Brothers and Sisters. Miami is the pure heroism of unpunished horror. The Battle of Florida was lost. Not even Castro won. Miami won, which reproduced and grounded a kind of Castroism little by little during decadent decades. Take a look in the malls, My Poor People–take those little checkered shirts that are sold in bulk off their hangers. You’ll see the labels of Cuban State Security, My Poor Love. The tackiness and the vulgarity. It’s the dirty trick somewhere between magic and secretiveness. As in Cuba, there is not even one word said by Cubans that isn’t false. Castroism is that: the outer shell of Cubanness, its disposability, its hahaha.

My Fellow Cubans, it is time to recognize that not only do we not want changes in our nation, but that we abundantly want to never again have a nation. The experience of having been subjects of the Kingdom of Death is irreparable. Now we will all die very alone, somnolent in a peevish rhetoric that debases us. We deserve to remain dead for the rest of our lifeless biographies.

Nobody is sadder than we. Nobody is more “We” than I.

Translated by Alicia Barraqué Ellison

18 December 2014