Cuba: Honest Opinion is Respectable, Lies are Abhorrent
Elio Delgado Legon
HAVANA TIMES — I have always respected the opinion of those who honestly express their dissatisfaction or disagreement with the socialist system and who prefer capitalism, even with all its evils and inequality.
Some of my friends have left Cuba for capitalist countries (in search of a dubious prosperity) and have not ceased being my friends because of this. Others remain in the country of their birth but openly express their disagreement with the socialist system, enjoying this system’s benefits, like free, quality healthcare and education for their children, to name only two of the main achievements of the socialist revolution.
All such individuals are respected and suffer no discrimination in our society, because they are honest people who are merely expressing their opinions.
Those who call themselves dissidents and follow the instructions of a foreign power, receiving money for their unpatriotic activities, however, are a different lot altogether. They are what I call counterrevolutionaries (I haven’t found a better term for them).
The small counterrevolutionary groups operating in Cuba, organized by CIA agents attached to the US Interests Section in Havana, have no arguments with which to attract anyone to their ranks and thus resort to lies and media spectacles. They also do this to maintain their dollar incomes, disbursed by a country that does everything in its power to destroy the Cuban revolution and the example it represents.
I could refer to many different cases, but two or three should suffice to prove my point. To swell their diminished ranks, counterrevolutionaries have recruited more than one common prison inmate, many a times guilty of numerous crimes. One of them was a wife-beater who was denounced by his mother-in-law. Others have been persuaded into going on a hunger strike, into putting their lives at risk, to put together a media spectacle.
Yet others have confessed that they ate in secret, after having declared themselves on a hunger strike, until their lies were unmasked.
One case that received a lot of attention from the international mass media was that of Guillermo Fariñas, who went on a hunger strike several times, until he was given a visa to travel to the United States and left the country.
Recently, this character appeared in a photo published by a Miami newspaper next to the confessed murderer, terrorist and torturer Luis Posada Carriles, and embracing the traitor Hubert Matos. With this photograph, Fariñas is basically confessing his true counterrevolutionary agenda, his willingness to commit all of the despicable crimes this terrorist demands of him.
More recently, there was another media spectacle surrounding former Cuban television actress Ana Luisa Rubio, a woman who everyone knows is mentally unstable, prone to violent outbursts and to insulting her neighbors in uncontrollable and offensive ways.
This last incident was sparked off by the pranks of some children who were playing in front of the actress’ building. Ana Luisa Rubio went out into the street and lashed at them, offending the mother of one of the children, whom she asked to come down. When the mother came to see what was happening, Ms. Rubio violently attacked her. The mother defended herself. According to witnesses, those who intervened did so to separate the two brawling women.
The witnesses approached claim that the bruises and blood on her face are makeup. They confirm that it is not true she was taken out of her home and assaulted, that the claim the fight was sparked off by her political ideas is a lie and that her face was not disfigured, as some ill-intentioned commenter’s state, written by people who insist on lying about the revolution and revolutionaries, insist.
I respect those who express their opinions honestly. Those who shamelessly lie in order to damage the revolution deserve nothing short of my hatred.
Walter, it should go without saying that the pointless loss of 78 innocent lives due to the ‘family squabble’ between the Castros and their Cuban cousins in Miami is a tragedy. This bombing, however, was not a result of US policy, but the lack thereof. The US has not had a cogent, executive-level strategy to deal with the Castro regime since the Elian Gonzales controversy. Relations with Cuba have been relegated to mid-level bureaucrats who owe their appointments to their positions to the influence of narrow-minded Miami exiles. It is because Cuba doesn’t matter much to the average American that the embargo has been in place for as long as it has. You seem to wish to give the dictatorship a pass by pointing out vaguely similar problems occurring in the US. There is a significant difference between the police brutality, government corruption and poor housing issues in Cuba and what occurs in the US. As often as possible in the US, the role of an independent media and legal system serve to expose and punish these abuses and failings on the path to fewer abuses and failings. In Cuba, these tactics and social defects are either ignored and/or covered up and many times are fomented by the regime as a means to maintain control over the people. Simply put, if a cop beats you Walter, you have every reason to believe that the local and national media where you live will camp out outside your home for a statement from you as to why an elderly man was subject to this abuse of power. If you lived in Cuba, would a Granma reporter be so apt to carry your story. Be honest, please.
In the comments sections here at Havana Times, I have repeatedly condemned the terrorist acts committed by Posada and others. I do so again. Honest dissidents do themselves no favours by allowing themselves to be associated with Posada in any way.
However, in the case of Guillermo Fariñas, we are shown a photograph of himself taken after a speech he gave in Miami. As is common at these events, spectators like to crowd around the guest speaker to get a photo taken. Often, the subject of the photo has no idea who these people are. We don’t know in this case whether Guillermo Fariñas was aware that the old man 3 persons to his left was Posada or not.
Would the defenders of the Castro regime like to take this opportunity to condemn the Tugboat Massacre, as a despicable act of state terrorism?
Elio, you call Huber Matos a “traitor”. This was a man who began his fight against Batista in 1952, two years before Fidel Castro launched his raid on the Moncado barracks. Matos continued that fight until the dictator Batista fled. Matos was arrested for speaking out against the growing influence of Communists within the revolution, a revolution which had been advertised as a broad based movement embracing all Cubans. As it turns out, Matos was correct: the Revolution was soon taken over by Communists, much to the misfortune of the Cuban nation. For speaking out, Matos was imprisoned for 20 years on the Isla de la Juventud where he claims he was tortured and abused many times. So who was the real traitor? The people who stole the revolution, or the man who spoke the truth about what was happening?
Lies, especially the propaganda lies of the regime and its supporters in this case, are indeed abhorrent. The fact that assaults on Cuban dissidents have increased and seem to have become the new standard is irrefutable.
“Aumentan las detenciones y golpizas a los disidentes cubanos –
Cuba”
http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2013/10/03/1581056/aumentan-las-detenciones-y-golpizas.html
What the author call “honest opinion” is really just another word for subservience.
I appreciate your reasoned approach to this difficult subject. I have read both your and the opposition piece and since I am not in Cuba and don’t have any special sources, I can’t know which set of claims are true. But both can’t be totally true. So I also look at the surrounding argumentation and there I find clear bias. Maybe Warhol P’s claims are true, but he loses credibility when he indulges in irrational exaggerations. Of course passions and perceptions are effected and driven by both politics and associations, but I find it revealing that most of the anti-revolutionary commentators ignore the point you make about self-admitted terrorists like Posada walking freely in Miami. I have yet to hear one of these “haters” say they hated the deaths of 78 passengers on flight 455, or any of the other victims of US policies.
“Honest Opinion is Respectable, Lies are Abhorrent” … and yet you regularly write for a site that has actively participated in the very hate propaganda campaign you are decrying, Elio. Why?
Havana Times published two vile articles attacking Cuban revolutionaries over Rubio’s alleged official beating, one from Alfredo Fernandez frothing about state “thugs” and linking the case to that of convicted wife-beater and supposed political victim Angel Santiesteban, and another equally contemptible one from “Warhol P,” titled (with inadvertent but perfectly apt self-reference) “Cuba: How Low Can We Stoop?”
Both these pieces lent the Havana Times’ purported reputation for honesty to this ugly propaganda stunt manufactured by the US regime’s Diario de Cuba hate factory.
Both pieces were then adorned with vicious, right-wing comments by the site’s anti-Cuba troll troop, spewing the anti-socialist hatred and slander that makes the pseudo-left Havana Times so often a twin for the far-right Miami Herald.
Elio, by writing for this site you are promoting the myth of open-mindedness that it trades on as its point of difference with its ranting right-wing rivals in the anti-Cuban blogosphere, the false branding that Havana Times uses to spread a spurious patina of honesty on the empire’s lies when it retails them. Is that helping the Revolution?
Keep on drinking the cool-aid.