Cuba Welcoming Uncle Sam

By Martin Guevara

HAVANA TIMES — This past Monday, the Cuban embassy opened in Washington and the US embassy opened in Havana.

This is a landmark event.

These days, when the United States is in vogue in Cuba and vice-versa, one gets the sense that the island is forging one of those “indestructible” friendships, of the kind it had with the Soviet Union and, more recently, with Venezuela.

This is certainly cause for joy, though it surprises one to see that the brothers Castromasov continue to hold power, in defiance of every natural and biological law.

That’s the moment one loses one’s bearings, until you suddenly realize what may have happened there.

As for me, I think I must have been quite distracted by my own affairs during this time and, in the same way I can’t remember who the Polish minister of the economy is or the name of Slovakia’s head of state eludes me, I may have missed the news that the United States has ceased to be the empire it used to be, that it’s become a socialist country and that it has successfully brought about nuclear disarmament, the non-negotiable conditions Fidel Castromasov once established to even consider sitting down to talk with what Cuba, once referred to as it natural enemy.

I concluded this is what must have happened unbeknownst to me when I also read that Silvio Rodriguez, Castromasov’s main cultural amulet within the Cuban de-evolution process – the man who celebrated Che Guevara’s call to make Latin America a powder keg and blow it up in the face of the United States (to create “one, two, three Vietnams”)-, is going to celebrate the new, tender relations between the countries with concerts in Washington, to be paid for in solid US currency, of course.

It’s not that we dare not imagine the good ole Castro may have changed his convictions for the umpteenth time, as is his habit, no, not at all, we know him well.

It’s the fact that Cuba’s recent history is overflowing with cases in which, faced with the slightest suggestion of a rapprochement with the “imperialist ogre,” the slaves under his command carried out all manner of abuses, from executions to obscenely long prison sentences, life-long banishments to humiliations of every sort, such that one finds it impossible to imagine another scenario for the warm, neighborly re-establishment of relations other than a profound transformation of US society, in the direction of communism or a Bolivarian republic.

If this is the case, I am sorry that the United States has decided to go the communist way. I would have preferred it remained a capitalist democracy with a broad spectrum of deeply-rooted social security policies. I do admit I celebrate nuclear disarmament, though.

I only feel a certain degree of embarrassment for having found out so late in the game and in such an unscientific way.

And even though I don’t get a particularly good feeling from hearing that General Motors is now in the hands of a socialist state (as I very much liked those big, beautiful cars that I now know I’ll never see again), if the lovers have decided to put an end to so much coitus interruptus in their tempestuous and passionate relationship and, through enduring love, to get along as governments, I say:

Long live the new-born and indestructible friendship between the Cuban Communist Party and the fraternal United Socialist States of America!