Cuba with Progress and Memory

Martin Guevara

HAVANA TIMES – In this timid first approach between Cuba and the United States, it’s pitiful to contemplate those people wanting to hold fast to their squalid privileges as golden exiles in the USA and accordingly wishing for no resolution to the few things that could be agreed upon, especially when you consider their island compatriots: tired, fed up, sick of shortages, of belts, of ropes around their necks.

But it makes me almost more indignant to watch all those two-bit opportunists, the world’s most obsequious and pusillanimous figures that could be found in the market of cowardice. Those who made a career out of sniffing the behinds of the managers, the Commander “Carrot Brothers”, agreeing to any adventure or any directive no matter how contradictory, even when this meant stomping on the rights of all of their fellow citizens in order to do so, or cursing their own blood, and calling them gusanos [worms].

These people condemned everything that came out of the “society of evil”, be it someone who preferred to live in the US or who merely thought differently; that “rabble full of filthy material objects”. (Of course, this was their public face – in private they were always the ones who had the most goods from the capitalist camp). Or, paraphrasing, using their own two favorite terms: that Scum and that Worm-hole.

Today, these same people are displaying clearly the ethical grain that constitutes their lives, as they quickly proceed to accommodate themselves to a future of close relations with the United States, gazing lasciviously at the empire’s genitals with their insatiable drooling tongues that will lubricate no more the Soviet, Chinese and Venezuelan dicks.

Expressing their love for the “Yankees” as they would scornfully call them – and as some of us predicted years ago – we will now surely see them doing dirty business with them, selling everything up to their parents’ underwear, unless of course they are kept from doing so by an aware opposition organized by the principled sector of the Cuban people in their now barefoot working classes, and in their incipient middle classes.

I feel a mix of both things.

To those possibility seekers who want to close the door and look the other way, I only say that they should take a look at Spain today, forty years after the death of the dictator. The entire Transition should be reviewed, because that business of accepting the condition of untouchables from the dictatorship that ceded to democracy as a postponable gift didn’t turn out to be as successful as it had promised to be.

Progress, yes, but with memory intact.
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Cover photo by Robert Hills