Who Ate the Cuba-Venezuela Cable?

Alfredo Fernandez

For days, and though the Cuban government hasn’t commented on the matter, word on the street has it that the fiber optic cable linking the towns of La Guaira (Venezuela) and Siboney (Cuba) doesn’t exist.

That’s right, it’s turned out that the most anxiously awaited cable in the history of Cuba “died before being born.” According to these rumors in the street, it was eaten by “sharks.”

They say it was due to poor quality materials, which simplified the tasks of the insatiable barracudas in the Caribbean.

According to that “hearsay,” this occurred even though the cable was expressly purchased by high-level executive administrators of the Ministry of Communications.

Yet this must have some truth, given the arrests and subsequent imprisonment of two deputies engaged in “performing other important tasks” for that agency’s then minister, Ramiro Valdes.

This all takes me back to my childhood days, when my elementary schoolteacher told me about some “very bad ministers” during the pre-revolutionary years of the Republic.  They stole everything, including funds for children’s school breakfasts.

In my infantile innocence, those men were the bad guys,” but they were also long-gone characters, despised to the point that they would never again gain a foothold in our country.

The truth is that today, at least in in my opinion, the real sharks that “ate the cable” live far from the depths of the Caribbean. Their habitat is located inside air-conditioned luxury cars, or beside the pools at “their homes,” with lobster and shrimp dishes, each of them with a glass of whiskey on one side and a pretty woman on the other.

The “sharks” that feasted on the $70 million cable that stretches between La Guaira and Siboney await cautiously for the “day after,” that’s why today they “stretch and stretch” the stitched-up guise of “comrade” for when the time comes, fully take advantage, this time of without restrictions of movement.

What’s more, they say that one of them likes to compare the Internet with “a wild horse yet to be tamed.” Perhaps behind this smile is concealed the real reason why he made sure the much-desired cable would never reach us. At least for now, the new era will not come at the galloping speed of such untamable stallions.