Prison Diary LVI: Decency and Decorum According to the Dictator – Part 2
/ Angel Santiesteban
Posted on October 1, 2013
Discourse of the Dictator II
"President" Raul Castro, cynically, busied himself patching the leak, as
we Cubans say, when in his speech he said, "I imagine the news in the
coming days, in the great international press that specializes in
denigrating Cuba and subjecting us to a frenzied scrutiny," that is:
their having a different opinion, as they have for the more than half
century of the dictatorship, is an attack on the country, a subversive plan.
With complete shamelessness, he said, "We have become accustomed to
living under siege and don't restrict ourselves to debating the reality
with total harshness," which might seem like a joke had it not cost the
Cuban people so dearly.
Later on, although it seems impossible, in increased the government's
audacity.
He spoke of the pain of twenty years, of the "increasing deterioration
of moral and civic values, such as honesty, decency, shame, decorum,
honor and sensitivity to the problems of others," as if the great school
of these losses wasn't his mis-governing, for more than fifty years, a
country that he has administered as if it were a private ranch, an
extension of the Biran of his parents.
A subject people, that has been brought to a high level of poverty and
human misery, where crime began to be a method of survival and stealing
food from workplaces, in order to survive, began to be seen by society
as acceptable, permitted, and as the years passed the act of stealing
came to be called "struggle" and those who did it "fighters," as he
recognized in his discourse: "So, one part of society has come to see
stealing from the State as normal," as if it weren't legitimate and they
hadn't stolen the lives of several generations.
That was the beginning of the amorality, they turned the country into
that: a gold digger people, going to the West, risking everything to try
their luck. Except that for the Cuban, any latitude looked promising, a
better song than reality, like an unreachable promise offered by its
leader Fidel Castro.
In this way, Raul Castro summarized the negative which had been known
for years: it is an unstoppable epidemic. This, the massive number of
Cuban prisons, overcrowded with young people waiting for the chance to
get out and commit crimes, because they know no other way of life; there
is no hope ahead for them or decent way to survive, other than to emigrate.
At the end of his speech he detailed, photographically, the Cuban
society they turned it into, the "new pines that dreamed"; but never
acknowledged their guilt, never admitted that we need another model,
that fifty-four years are more than enough to understand that they are
not offering a dignified path, and that it's time to allow Cuba to start
its ascent to economic development and human betterment.
In his speech Raul Castro asserted that screaming out loud in the street
is bad behavior, forgetting that earlier it was they who screamed and
called it "Revolutionaries defending the Revolution." When they screamed
"Worms! Let them go!" and handed out beatings and humiliations, their
conduct then wasn't improper. From the time we were children they
trained us to scream slogans in the street in support of some national
event, or to repudiate, in the world they programmed, those they
classify as undesirable.
Illegal constructions, like the black market, have been the relief of
the Cuban family, because their non-working government has not given
them solutions to their needs.
How can they demand that people work full days when they don't pay them
for their real work? Their sacrifices, like during colonization, are
paid for with trinkets.
One of Raul Castro's great lies in his presentation was to assert that
if society is warped and overrun with disorder and marginality, it has
been, "Abusing the nobility of the Revolution which hasn't resorted to
the use of force, favoring conviction and political work."
Don't panic dear readers, it's not a joke, although it could be in the
genre known as "noir." Later he urged State agencies, "the Police, the
Comptroller General of the Republic, the Prosecutor, and the Courts," to
push even harder. That is, we should expect the prison population to
grow even more than its already excessive numbers, the prisons will
triple. It will be one great prison within the other floating prison.
Then, the ruler "meditated" on the negative demonstrations, thought
about everything that had deceived the world, the specialized agencies,
like the United Nations, and he had "the bitter feeling that we are an
increasingly educated society, but not, perhaps, a more cultured one."
Unfortunately this is Cubans' reality, but even worse is that in his
speech he didn't recognize his inability to govern, nor even touch on
the possibility of accepting some blame.
One comes to the conclusion that he presides over a putrid society that
should force him to resign, to give way to a new formula that reawakens
and steers the twisted path followed in this half century.
To retrace all our steps will cost us just as much as the distance we
have strayed from the dignity and honesty of José Martí that we have lost.
But we must come to the conclusion that our country was corrupted, crime
and marginality became widespread, by the work and grace of the
Caribbean winds.
The Castros… they never had anything to do with this reality.
Ángel Santiesteban-Prats, Prison 1580
Editor's note: This post is the second part of what Angel sent me when
he was still in Prison 1580, in San Miguel del Padron. It refers to Raul
Castro's speech at the First Ordinary Session of the VIII Legislature of
the National Assembly of People's Power at the Convention Center on 7
July 2013. The first part was published August 5th.
30 September 2013
Source: "Prison Diary LVI: Decency and Decorum According to the Dictator
– Part 2 / Angel Santiesteban | Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/prison-diary-lvi-decency-and-decorum-according-to-the-dictator-part-2-angel-santiesteban/
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