Cuba’s Leader and His Flexible Principles

By Martin Guevara

HAVANA TIMES — With a skillful juggling act, Raul Castro surprises us with a new facet of his, presenting himself as a leader and guardian of peace in Colombia.

Raul Castro, president of Cuba and the Cuban Army’s Chief for decades, encouraged, participated in and orchestrated a significant number of armed conflicts in Latin America, which left a wake of pain in the continent, expressed in deaths, prisoners, disappearances, exiles of every political party and ideological sentiment, and led extremely bloody wars in most of the Third World, especially in Africa.

He was the War Commander in Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Angola twice, from his office, using the excuse of proletarian internationalism to hide other less honorable intentions, such as benefiting from ivory and diamond profits, while increasing professionalism and the power of Cuba’s Armed Forces.

All because he took orders from his “great brother”, who aspired to become a kind of Marshal of the Third World, as long as the fairytale that the URSS nightmare would last forever on its path from socialism to communism, would come true, and maintain their unconditional logistical and strategic support for the Kastromasov brothers in such conflicts.

The most stunning characteristic of these satraps goes beyond the level of repression, lying, and the kidnapping of freedom and truth for generations. Not even their will to destroy the values of society, the norms of coexistence, harmony, prosperity, to which they are the champions.

It goes much further than this.

The most amazing thing about these leaders, guardians and standard bearers, but not of peace, but of power no matter what the cost, is their lack of even the tiniest trace of respect, modesty or shame while they go gallivanting around and showing off their comfortable lifestyles while they leave a wake of suffering in the lives of others.

However, more than this, if there’s any space left, the focus of a study on this establishment will be, without a doubt, the art of managing to get the civilized, progressive world, defenders of human rights, to tolerate them and let them get away with excess or nonsense, without condemning them, or showing the least signs of changing their ways, regret or punishment after so many categorized and consensual cases of “crimes against humanity”.

The royal Cuban family went from being owners of a large estate to being Jesuits, to being pro-US democracy, to Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist communists when they collaborated in Trotsky’s murder, repressors of any kind of personal freedom, to being the vanguard of international guerrillas, to collaborating with the Videla and Galtieri dictatorships in Argentina, to being in favor of encouraging large international capitalist companies to invest in Cuba apart from Cubans, to becoming Jesuits again when the USSR collapsed, to being more Catholic, to becoming Marxist-Leninist revisionists when praising Chavez, a high-ranking military commander who reconverted into a reformist, whose empty and manipulative discourse would have been accused by the Cuban Communist Party of my time of being “populist reformism and ideological diversionism,” far from any basic Communist doctrine or philosophy being pro-easy dollars substituting Russian Roubles or Venezuelan oil, in the name of the USA.

And in the last metamorphosis, reconverted into nothing more than pacifists, after fifty seven years of continuing to make the mistake of underestimating them, it’s time to recognize that they are more alive than hunger, and that after half a century we realize that, in actual fact, they are consistent and coherent Marxists, but not in the style of a tormented Karl, but rather of a nonsensical Groucho when he used to say:  “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”