Cuba-US Dispute, All in the Family?

Repatriado*

HAVANA TIMES — I won’t pull any punches… I believe that there isn’t a Cuba-US dispute. It doesn’t exist; I think it’s a publicity ruse by a family, the Castro-Diaz-Balarts, who managed to take control of Cuban politics in the two places it exists, Havana and Washington, over the past more than half century, inciting fanaticism on both sides.

Sometimes, we forget just how close the Castros and Diaz-Balarts are and here’s one fact, the Cuban Royal Family’s first-born was called Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart.

During the time Fidel was considered a gangster, Rafael Diaz-Balart, a notorious politician and the future father-in- law of the Revolution’s leader had already got him out of one problem with the police because of the young man’s violent actions. However Rafael then criticized the amnesty granted by Batista 1955, (for the jailed perpetrators, including Fidel, of the 1953 attack on two army barracks), maybe he was bothered by the treatment his abandoned daughter got, but it was a sweeping opposition, non-specific to Fidel.

These families have managed to create a perfect symbiotic relationship, nourishing the other’s theater thereby mutually creating the conditions they need to survive in power. The anti-Castro lobby has been greatly dominated by a part of the Castro family in Washington. Is this irrelevant?

If we take this clan out of it, we are left with a giant, the United States, influencing us using the power it has accumulated and via the eternal dialectics of the weaker party’s need-repulsion, admiration-envy of the powerful, but all of this within what is historically “normal”, without this being allegedly peculiar to Cuba.

For Fidel, anti-US sentiments and holding firmly onto power were the only guide for his politics. He half-heartedly confessed this in a letter to Celia Sanchez where he clarified that his destiny was to screw the US over, his great excuse, the Dispute.

Is it because they never responded to the letter he sent to I-don’t-know-which US president as a child asking for 10 dollars?

Fidel made keeping alive this alleged Dispute a national mission which was entrusted to the press, who have made the lie of a modern Numantia surrounded by an all-mighty Scipio, which was only saved thanks to the undefeated bearded leader.

You can’t talk about this Dispute without mentioning the Blockade, a US policy to overthrow the tyrants in Cuba. However refusing to trade with someone isn’t illegal or anything new, more-so when this someone is a known enemy who hoards even the smallest resource in the country that represses and self-blocks itself with countless restrictions on progress, a progress which was only more or less interesting if it strengthened his hold on power.

The blockade is such a cynical subject! If the Castros have been trying to get us to hate the US for 60 years, then how do they want us to trade with them? If  as Fidel used to argue, the imperialists plundered the wealth of oppressed people, wouldn’t refusing to trade with the fruit of these exploits be the right thing to do? In reality, if the Castros were to be coherent in their discourse for once, they themselves should have refused to buy an ounce of anything from Imperialism.

What is more, if the Blockade is so illegal, and I repeat this isn’t a blockade but one sovereign country’s refusal to trade with another, why doesn’t the government go to the International Criminal Court like Evo Morales did in landlocked Bolivia? No, they prefer the show at the UN General Assembly rather than seriously dealing with this matter. For them, the Blockade is just fuel for the idea of a Dispute which they live off.

I really believe that if this Dispute really existed, the majority of Cubans would see an enemy in the US thereby confirming the official discourse. But instead, I see so many ugly clothes with the Stars and Stripes on the street and I see so many young people wanting the “American way of life,” whatever that is. This really makes it hard for me to believe that the Cuba-US Dispute isn’t just one more lie of the many that the Castro-Diaz-Balart family has upheld so as to keep their place in the revolutionary fable.

My wild guess is that the Castro and the Diaz-Balart are in on it together, but it’s hard to deny just how useful one has been for the other.
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*I’ve used a pseudonym because I’m afraid that my humble internet account might be taken away from me or that I might be harassed financially. This might be a fear without grounds, but I don’t know for certain and as I’m not brave, I avoid the risk because what I most fear is losing the mask that I put on in front of my beloved and “revolutionary” grandfather.