“You Have to Wipe Out Your Enemies!”: Cuban Emigres Celebrate

By Tatiana Rodriguez (dpa)

HAVANA TIMES – “You have to wipe out your enemies!” said energetically Serafin Arvello, one of the Cuban emigres who congregated in Miami to anxiously await US president Donald Trump’s announcement that he will revoke the rapprochement process with Cuba which his predecessor, Barack Obama, had pushed forward during the last years of his presidency.

The Cubans who mostly left the Caribbean country decades ago on board rafts or small boats, received one of the most long-awaited pieces of news this Friday, especially those who supported the Republican magnate’s ideas in his presidential campaign.

“I was in a raft for five days, using the stars to guide me and leaving everything behind. The Castro regime is the worst and is destroys everything in its path. Let them blockade everything and continue on punishing Cuba until this family is removed from power,” the old man who reached Florida’s shores 30 years ago insisted in his conversation with dpa.

The celebration was paramount at “Versailles”, the famous Cuban restaurant which is a meeting point for thousands of Cubans who are living in the US and is located in the neighborhood which Cuban emigres have taken as their own, “Little Havana”.

Dozens of Cubans, both in and outside the restaurant having coffee and pastries, spoke about the freeze-over that the US president has once again ordered ending the thawing process that Obama began in 2015, when the democrat leader reestablished ties with Cuba after over 50 years of rupture.

According to the Cuban Democracy Movement leader Ramon Sanchez, what Trump did on Friday, to effectively stop US tourism to the island and to try and stop USD entering the hands of Raul Castro’s government, “is just the beginning.”

“They really need to crack down,” Sanchez pointed out, who understood the fact that Trump made this speech in Miami as a gesture of solidarity, but he also pointed out the fact that it is primarily the US government who will benefit from this policy change.

“What we need to achieve are democratic elections in order to overthrow this Castro regime and allow people to live as they wish,” he insisted.

It is estimated that almost three million Cubans have reached the US searching, mainly, for a better life while others have fled the regime which the late Fidel Castro began over five decades ago with the Cuban Revolution.

Sanchez further notes that Cubans are today hoping “to see a different Cuba.”  “Historic conditions which the regime is facing without its main leader and without the support of historically important powers, gives us a light at the end of the tunnel that we are close.”