Cuba is Still a Beacon for the Progressive World

Elio Delgado Legon

HAVANA TIMES — I often come across certain Internet sites that publish articles written by detractors of the Cuban revolution. I say “detractors” to avoid calling them something else, as these characters are constantly playing into the enemy’s hands by making statements about our political and economic system.

It doesn’t bother me, just as it doesn’t bother our main leaders either, that differing opinions should be expressed, as we cannot hope to have everyone think the same way. But opinions about aspects they dislike about the system, or part of it, is one thing, and opinions based on lies and slander designed to denigrate our revolution (which has cost our people many sacrifices) is quite another.

It is maddening to read paragraphs that speak of “macabre episodes of repression against dissidents, “scandalous convictions for the crime of defending different ideas, fits by leaders that cause unnecessary privation and death and hundreds of thousands of people crossing oceans and jungles, risking it all for a better life.”

Anyone who has no knowledge of Cuban reality and reads paragraphs like that one is horrified and goes away with a completely distorted image of our country’s situation.

How can this person speak of macabre episodes of repression against dissidents when they can write such slanderous statements without being bothered by anyone? Where are the scandalous convictions for defending different ideas if the person spreading these lies isn’t in jail, not because they have different ideas, but because of slander?

Cuba has long ceased to have any prisoners of the type the counterrevolution and imperialism called “political prisoners” or “prisoners of conscience,” when, in fact, those who were once convicted – and those sentences were never outrageous – had broken the law carrying out anti-government activities, acting as mercenaries paid by the most powerful empire on the planet, which makes no secret of its intention of changing Cuba’s political system, or, in other words, restoring neoliberal capitalism in Cuba.

In the same paragraph, there’s talk of unnecessary privation and death, a statement that’s groundless and serves only to confuse and sow doubt in those readers who do not know our reality.

Lastly, the paragraph in question mentions hundreds of thousands of people crossing oceans and jungles, risking everything for a better life.

The figures and words used give the sense of a mass exodus, the kind we might see in Syria, Libya and other African countries, but not Cuba. Everyone has the right to go in search of a better life in developed countries, where the standard of living is higher. However, those who leave Cuba do so lured by the preferential treatment offered them by the United States under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law designed precisely to prompt such exoduses and to spread propaganda against the revolution through mercenaries of the written word, who write what the empire needs them to write, in support of their anti-Cuba policies.

Those who write such diatribes, however, do not say a single word about the genocidal blockade, the main reason Cuba cannot make quicker progress towards the sustainable development we aspire to and work for, with the solidarity of all the world’s peoples.

Since the triumph of the revolution in 1959, Cuba has been a beacon for all progressive people on the planet. And, even though its detractors claim it has failed, those who know us well and support us around the world insist Cuba continues to be a beacon of dignity and resistance that inspires revolutionaries around the world.