MARIELA AND ANTONIO CASTRO, DESCENDANTS OF THE REGIME
I don’t imagine Cubans putting up with another fifty years of “castrismo”. I say this because lately one can observe an induced and growing role by two offshoots of the Castro-Ruz family that don’t suggest they will distance themselves much from the actors of the past.
Incidentally, these two little kids of Daddy 1 & 2, have been planted in sectors very sensitive to the public eye, which could be a strategy of the regime, with the end result of assigning them as possible heirs to the power acquired by Fidel and Raul, authors during this more than half century of the oldest Communist dictatorship in Latin America.
For some time now, Dr. Antonio Castro –youngest son of Fidel– has been promoted from the premises of Cuban baseball. An institution which, as a physician for the Cuban team, placed him in the kingdom of the national sport of the island, to wit showing off today the powerful position of vice-president of the Cuban Amateur Baseball Federation (Federación Cubana de Beisbol Amateur). An opening which permits Tony to handle an extensive sector, to which he shows an increasingly visible “benevolent” face.
The other case is that of sexologist Mariela Castro –daughter of current president Raúl Castro– and director of the National Center for Sexual Education of Cuba (Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual de Cuba), who right now counts on the unlimited backing that has catapulted her into the public arena, using a social program in defense of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights.
A great part of this social segment, so needy of God and not Mariela, naïvely lends its shoulders so she can place her hands and elevate herself on behalf of a supposed fight for the breach of taboos present in Cuban society and the world in general. An open opportunity for Castro Espín, with her a consistent and “dosed” publicity, so she may scale positions and fame, not only within the island, but face to face with worldwide public opinion, which she is starting to manipulate at her whim with surprising aplomb.
At the start of this year, Mariela made a little jaunt to Europe, where she caught the attention of the secular press after her skillful visit to a neighborhood in the Dutch capital where prostitutes operate. Her praise, for the conditions in which these women work, reminded us of the declarations of her Uncle Fidel, who some years ago raised backyard prostitutes to the skies, of course, in spite of having held since the beginning of his revolution that this legacy engendered by capitalism would be eradicated.
Recently the sexologist also traveled to the United States, a country that gave her a visa without much thought other than to the great game of the possible flexibility of the “blockade”. From Californian territory, Mariela stood out as a dangerous instrument of change that moves between two powerful forces: the Cuban exile community and the Communist dictatorship. The most reluctant of the first, reacted with a laundry-list of diatribes that –reasonable or not– stamped her with an excessive resonance that kept her in the headlines of the great North American press, to whom she expressed –among other things– her support for the reelection of Barack Obama. A message probably originating from the aging Castro-Ruz dynasty which takes advantage of the situation to sell Castro Espín as a leader with a progressive eye capable of maintaining the Communist ideology of her family.
The daughter of the Cuban president. A “gifted” sexologist of authoritarian and intolerant customs, presents herself in all plazas not only as a defender of homosexuals, but also as the ultimate protector of the politics of the regime headed by her father. Her irony goes so far as to elude the touching realities at the levels of violence, sex and alcohol present in Cuban society, to which we must add the use of an emphatic language trying to “refute” the violations of human rights in Cuba, lamentably substituted by sexual rights.
Her duplicity is made clear once and again when she won’t move a finger in defense of homosexuals who belong to Cuban civil society, who on repeated occasions the political police have arrested and beaten in order to stop their marches and actions, even if they are in support of the public activities of Castro Espín. One thing is certain, if there is something that this family knows how to do to the detriment of others, it is the manipulation of techniques of disqualification to exclude all those within the island who don’t agree with the system. Thus with the same “mastery” of Fidel and Raul, in front of professionals at a San Francisco hospital during her recent trip to the United States, Mariela Castro took it out on philologist Yoani Sánchez whom she accused of being a mercenary paid by the empire, and branded the Cuban exile community as a mafia, holding them responsible for paralyzing a normalization between Cuba and the United States.
It is crystal clear, the Communist monarchy just like North Korea, is betting on a leader who will vindicate the Castro surname. Apparently one of its females (Mariela) possesses genes of the same stock. Her familiar “fidelity”, makes it a given that the regime expects to extend itself even more.
Leonpadron10@gmail.com Blog: leonlibredecuba
Translator: Maria Montoto
5 June 2012
