History and hysteria, journalists and dissidents

By Repatriado

HAVANA TIMES — During the 8th Summit of the Americas held in Peru, the “civil society” who had been chosen, indoctrinated, funded and guided by the Castro government was the spearhead against other Cubans, the ones they call “mercenaries backed by the CIA”, while the rearguard here in Cuba made a noisy hysteria campaign to try and defame the dissident voices in the media.

The person to catch UPEC journalists/soldiers’ attention is Rosa Maria Paya. Anyone who has wanted or needed to prove their loyalty to the regime has vomited all over her.

They call this woman “stateless”, a “traitor”, “liar”, “annexationist” and say that she has asked for a military intervention in Cuba, that she has made money off of her father’s death and other niceties that I can’t remember or don’t want to remember.

I don’t know what Rosa Maria Paya does, I know nothing about her way of thinking or what she’s said, I don’t know because she doesn’t have access to any media platform here in Cuba to communicate her projects and ideas. We Cubans on the island only know that the Communist Party Central Committee’s Ideological Department guide their media outlets to tell us about her, a lot of adjectives more than anything else.

All of this commotion reminds me of a not-so-old story.

Once upon a time, in a far-away kingdom, there was an intelligent young man, whose father was an awarded official of a government that was legitimate and recognized as an independent nation by the international community.

Neither the young man nor his eldest brother continued on the path of being loyal to their father’s government; the brother got so excited he decided to make a bomb to kill the king, and whoever was there at the time, but he was discovered and executed for being a terrorist.

The young man became a radical and started acting out against the government. He was arrested after a short while and he decided to emigrate. He continued his activity against his country’s legitimate government while in exile. He lived abroad for 20 years, committed to the cause and working very little thanks to the money his mother sent him, money that came from his father’s pension as a government official. It seemed he would just be any other emigre, bitter without having much influence over the events in his Homeland.

Then, things changed.

His country was now at war with another country, a military and warmongering nation that wanted an empire. The man of our story was already more than 45 years old, but did he relax his criticism against his country’s government and close ranks now that it was being attacked from the outside?

No, on the contrary, he served the Imperial power that was killing his fellow countrymen by the thousands and taking advantage of their mutual interest, he let this power finance him, under the promise that once he came into power, he would remove his country from the war.

So, this man, the son of a loyal State official, the brother of a terrorist, who had traveled a lot with his father’s state pension, put his Homeland in the hands of the power that was attacking it and he returned to his country in an Imperialist vehicle, with an entourage of helpers and he was able to overthrow the government thanks to this help.

The now powerful man then kept his side of the deal and signed a peace deal where his country gave, with respect to the areas it controlled before the war, 75% of industrial areas, 35% of farming land and a similar portion of the population.

That’s the story.

Seeing how the government treats Cuban dissidents, how much rage would pro-government Cuban press unload on somebody with this track record? Traitor, sell-out, mercenary, opportunist, terrorist, I can’t even imagine the anger they would throw this man’s way.

Vladimir Ilich Ulianov, a.k.a. Lenin, whose photo hangs in every one of our bureaucrats’ offices and at our glorious and only Party’s congresses, is the man we have been talking about and I’ve told this story in the same black and white tone Party media uses against anti-Castro Cubans.

I trust that government agents, who have been assigned the task of monitoring Havana Times, will call their bosses when they read this story so that the latter can tell journalists that as of tomorrow, every time Cuban press talks about “mercenaries” like Rosa Maria Paya, they will say, well, Lenin was worse…