14ymedio, Pedro Corzo, Miami, April 27, 2024 — What drives many intellectuals to voluntarily submit to the authority of a despot? It is a question that overwhelms many ordinary citizens, because it is inconceivable that people who may be among those who lose the most in an autocratic society are among the most willing to pay tribute to a tyranny. This new reflection about intellectuals who voluntarily submit to an oppressor is relevant for the recent First International Book Fair that was held in Tampa, a poor imitation of the First Exiled Cuban Book Fair that opened in Miami in 2015, sponsored by journalist and writer Silvio Mancha and several exile organizations.
The Tampa Fair was tarnished by the presence and participation of home-grown Castro intellectuals. They create narratives to cover the failures and abuses of the Havana regime and even subscribe to documents which support the ignominies of the dictatorship as did Francisco López Sacha and Rigoberto Rodríguez Entenza, signatories of the letter that in 2022 endorsed the repression of the peaceful protests in Cuba against Castro and his lackeys. I clarify, not all servants live on the Island.
Cuban totalitarianism has been an absolute failure, but it is undeniable that its ability to survive must be added to other successes which highlight its talent for repression and its ability to attract servants in the creative arts, specifically in the media and literature.
Usually the intellectual is an individual who flees from commitments
Usually the intellectual is an individual who flees from commitments. Their freedom to do and think are the essential passports of their spirit. They are iconoclasts, rebels and destructors of ways of thinking.
However, apparently, there is something hidden in the Cuban creative consciousness that treasures a vulgar and cruel primitivism. Tempestuous passions can provoke reactions that obscure critical thinking. Castroism has been successful because it has bought or seduced many creators.
It is true that there are authors who irrupt into a controlled world, subject to a supreme authority, such as in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, where the new creators are subject to the guidelines that their predecessors managed with their genuflecting behaviors.
In those cases, an inevitable period of learning and convulsions is understandable, which will determine whether they are free citizens or applauders. However, those who came before the most recent are guilty of having created the mire that the new generation of intellectuals must go through in those countries.
Castroism doesn’t rest. Spying on and infiltrating free societies with hitmen is its life mission, universities being the main focus of attraction to capture those “enlightened” people who have served it with devotion.
In Cuba there is no NGO linked to the Government that is free and even less so is the Union of Writers of Artists of Cuba
You cannot be naive with Castroism. In Cuba there is no NGO linked to the Government that is free and even less so is the Union of Writers of Artists of Cuba, Uneac, one of the main creative focuses of the dictatorship. Uneac served the repression and lies from the day it was founded, for example with the cultural exchanges where the oppressor decides the conditions.
The novelist and writer Jose Antonio Albertini, who wrote his first novel in Cuba clandestinely, in addition to taking it off the Island in secret, was one of the first to denounce the Castro penetration at the Tampa Fair, describing the Uneac members as “excremental riflemen of the false narrative of Castroism.”
Albertini also says that the servitude to Castroism has tried to influence the Miami Book Fair. Also, we must not forget that the famous poet Ángel Cuadra, an intellectual committed to freedom and democracy, was excluded from those events by a political disagreement with a publishing house.
No person with common sense denies how vital it is for the future of Cuba that its children get to know each other and work together, but those who defend totalitarianism should not and cannot participate in that task because that system destroyed the Republic and puts the nation at risk.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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