MONDAY, JANUARY 19, 2009
Barack Obama: The End of Hope for Cuba
I have received many e-mails from readers, both known and unknown to me, asking me to re-consider my decision to close this blog [Review of Cuban-American Blogs] on January 20th [2009]. At the same time, my own determination to do so was strengthened daily by the events leading up to Inauguration Day. Bush may not have listened to Cubans, but Obama listens to the wrong Cubans. As soon as it is possible for him to do so, and sooner even than most of us expect, the juggernaut of normalization will roll over every Cuban on the island, leaving them parallel with their surroundings. There is nothing that can be done to stop him and much that we must do to prepare ourselves, as best as we can, for the greatest defeat we have ever sustained in our struggle against tyranny in our country.
In 1959, the United States installed Castro in power and it has been the guarantor of Communism in Cuba since 1962. What it has not done, however, is to underwrite the enterprise. That was a task left to America's enemies. This is going to change now. Cuba will remain the only Communist state under U.S. military protection but now it will also enjoy all the benefits of commerce with this nation, or leastwise its oppressors will. After defaulting on every foreign creditor and exhausting every line of credit while amassing the largest per
Since there can be no resumption of diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba until it settles U.S. claims against it, Obama will float the regime a loan so that it can pay pennies on the dollar for the properties it confiscated and nationalized before Obama was born, receiving in return clear title to them, which will enable it to sell those same properties at market value to a new generation of greedy and ignorant American investors, who will pour billions into the island with the assurance that the U.S. government will bail them out when the regime decides again that seizing American assets is more beneficial than trading with the enemy.
The biggest losers in this arrangement will be the Cuban people, who will not regain their liberty, but become subject to the exploitation of even more foreigners. Their masters will multiply but the quality of their lives will not improve. A prosperous tyranny is always to be more feared than one on the verge of economic collapse. The means of repression will expand and be fortified with the profits that the regime will reap from trade with the U.S. There will be no sharing of the wealth, however, because economic rights always anticipate political rights, and a regime that has always regarded both as anathema will not open the door to one knowing that it leads to the other.
The result of "normalization" (what a quaint word as if any relationship with a regime like Castro's could ever be anything but abnormal!) will prove detrimental to all parties except Castro and his henchmen. Those who espouse rapprochement do so because they hope to profit from the suffering of the Cuban people. Obama, besides acting on his ideological affinities with Castro, hopes to score a cheap coup de theatre by renewing relations with Communist Cuba, which the media are sure to represent as the greatest diplomatic feat in history, surpassing the opening of Japan by Perry or of China by either Marco Polo or Nixon. American businessmen, industrialists and agronomists, who have spent 8 years drooling about the prospects of trade with Cuba as Bush dangled that putrid carrot before them, will trample one another like elephants even before they reach the cliff.
To do business with Cuba will become more important than to do justice to Cubans. Human rights there will become as irrelevant as human rights in China without the Cuban people ever being compensated with an extra bowl of porridge for surrendering to the stomach what rightly belongs to the spirit.
This is what the election of Barack Obama means to Cubans and why tomorrow will always be a day of mourning for our country.
For my part, I prefer to mourn in private, which is the reason that I have decided to close the Review of Cuban-Americans Blogs tomorrow.
In 1959, the United States installed Castro in power and it has been the guarantor of Communism in Cuba since 1962. What it has not done, however, is to underwrite the enterprise. That was a task left to America's enemies. This is going to change now. Cuba will remain the only Communist state under U.S. military protection but now it will also enjoy all the benefits of commerce with this nation, or leastwise its oppressors will. After defaulting on every foreign creditor and exhausting every line of credit while amassing the largest per
Since there can be no resumption of diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba until it settles U.S. claims against it, Obama will float the regime a loan so that it can pay pennies on the dollar for the properties it confiscated and nationalized before Obama was born, receiving in return clear title to them, which will enable it to sell those same properties at market value to a new generation of greedy and ignorant American investors, who will pour billions into the island with the assurance that the U.S. government will bail them out when the regime decides again that seizing American assets is more beneficial than trading with the enemy.
The biggest losers in this arrangement will be the Cuban people, who will not regain their liberty, but become subject to the exploitation of even more foreigners. Their masters will multiply but the quality of their lives will not improve. A prosperous tyranny is always to be more feared than one on the verge of economic collapse. The means of repression will expand and be fortified with the profits that the regime will reap from trade with the U.S. There will be no sharing of the wealth, however, because economic rights always anticipate political rights, and a regime that has always regarded both as anathema will not open the door to one knowing that it leads to the other.
The result of "normalization" (what a quaint word as if any relationship with a regime like Castro's could ever be anything but abnormal!) will prove detrimental to all parties except Castro and his henchmen. Those who espouse rapprochement do so because they hope to profit from the suffering of the Cuban people. Obama, besides acting on his ideological affinities with Castro, hopes to score a cheap coup de theatre by renewing relations with Communist Cuba, which the media are sure to represent as the greatest diplomatic feat in history, surpassing the opening of Japan by Perry or of China by either Marco Polo or Nixon. American businessmen, industrialists and agronomists, who have spent 8 years drooling about the prospects of trade with Cuba as Bush dangled that putrid carrot before them, will trample one another like elephants even before they reach the cliff.
To do business with Cuba will become more important than to do justice to Cubans. Human rights there will become as irrelevant as human rights in China without the Cuban people ever being compensated with an extra bowl of porridge for surrendering to the stomach what rightly belongs to the spirit.
This is what the election of Barack Obama means to Cubans and why tomorrow will always be a day of mourning for our country.
For my part, I prefer to mourn in private, which is the reason that I have decided to close the Review of Cuban-Americans Blogs tomorrow.
7 comments:
For recent comments on the trade embargo:
Un encuentro clandestino con Ernesto Lodoño
Dear Friend:
What a sad day, yesterday I walked around like a zombie, in total shock, I have yet to recover.
I searched your blog over and over yesterday, hoping for a post from you, I figured you were in the same state as I so I decided not to bother you.
We have been doomed since 1959, now we have been stabbed in the back by the worst American president ever, how right you were when you closed RCAB, you knew this was coming, all these years of waiting have been for naught.
Now our poor people will become real slaves, may God have mercy on them.
Dear Vana:
We as a people are not deserving of our fate. All our missteps would never have led to national immolation if it were not for the interference in our affairs, always for the worst, of a powerful neighbor whose ignorance about our country and the false assumptions based upon that ignorance consigned us to slavery 55 years ago and now entails upon us that condition for all generations to come. Cuba Libre used to have two enemies, but now they are one.
Manuel:
Halfway through your post yesterday I realized you had written it at RCAB just before closing it, you my friend are a clairvoyant, you saw it all coming, while we sat with our fingers crossed.
I made the mistake of re-reading it at work, I started bawling like a baby, finally the shock of what happened on Tuesday hit me like a thunderbolt, and the tears flowed.
All is really lost now, all the years of hoping and waiting for nothing, makes one feel even more helpless than before, I used to hope, now I have none.
Why could they not have left us to our own fate, as you say even we would not have done this to ourselves.
It's a sad time my friend, I always knew we were alone, now we really are.
Thank you my friend for you, I always look to you for answers, and you have always been right.
As always I remain your friend and student
Vana
Dear Vana:
I am grateful to you, as always, for your kind words which always buoy my spirit.
For more than 50 years, we have had nothing but a hope, at times strong, at other times less so. Still, that hope sustained us and it is to our credit that we never abandoned it in the face of almost endless disappointments and betrayals. Now that hope is gone and will not return.
We have the remote past and nothing more. For half a century we have been looking at our country through a fence, the same fence from which our countrymen look out at the world. The fence is still there and will always be there. The ravished land and macerated people are still there as well. The tyrant and his new allies are also there. But the hope of a free Cuba, which may always have been an illusion, is not even an illusion anymore.
"And has the fact that 'every other country in the world still trades with Cuba' resulted in the restoration of democracy there? Has swarms of Canadian and Euro-trash tourists (as well as 600,000 Americans in the last 5 years) resulted in any improvement in human rights on the island? It seems that engagement with the Castro regime yields absolutely nothing that would justify consorting with its tyrants. Why, then, taint yourself by underwriting those tyrants and perpetuating their tyranny? Supporting the regime by extending diplomatic recognition to it or trading with it shows only your contempt for the Cuban people, its victims."
Potential Republican presidential candidates at odds over U.S. lifting Cuban embargo
We have the remote past, nothing more, remote indeed, but I tell you my friend, nothing can erase from me those days, longing is such a murderous feeling, it tugs at you until it leaves you breathless.
Thanks my friend
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