Freedom for Cuba, now or never

They raised the banner of a revolution that promised to change not only Cuba's destiny, but also that of the whole of Latin America. 

The European intellectual elites unhesitatingly bought into that illusion, spurred on by a Cold War in which the Soviet Union of the time was winning the more than decisive cultural battle, through gigantic planetary propaganda operations, against a United States in the process of establishing itself as the world's hegemonic superpower and gendarme. 

Cuba, the Pearl of the Antilles for the Spaniards who turned it into the main trading port with the metropolis, had become the third country in terms of GDP and per capita income in Latin America, behind only Argentina, already afflicted by the virus of Peronism, and Venezuela, whose prosperity continued to attract huge numbers of European immigrants. 

The European and American lefts boosted the prestige of Castroism, justifying it on the grounds that Cuba had ceased to be ‘the brothel of the United States’, and that the experiment in tropical communism would make Cuban education and health care the model to be imitated and followed by all the countries of the then so-called Third World. It was ignored that the US mafias themselves had encouraged Fidel Castro's seizure of power in order to eliminate the most competitive territory in the already buoyant Las Vegas in terms of vice, prostitution and entertainment. 

The Soviet missile crisis in Cuba, finally dismantled in exchange for the Americans doing the same in Turkey, gave way to Washington's imposition of close surveillance of Cuba's maritime commercial traffic. Castroism called it a blockade, a term totally inappropriate to the reality, but which has served for more than half a century as a pretext to justify the descent into the hells of misery on the island, until reaching the current desperate situation. 

I borrow from the great Cuban writer in exile Zoé Valdés the reference to Cuba's resemblance to Mars: ‘Scientists confirm - she says - that on the Red Planet there is no life because there is no water, no electricity, no food, just like in Cuba’. Such is the situation that has led to a totalitarian and corrupt regime, which no longer even bothers to invent semantic formulas to cover up its more than resounding failure. Except for the regime's ‘nomenklatura’, there is no future for Cubans except flight to wherever, especially to the United States, a flight that the Castro regime has allowed and encouraged in various waves. 

In this manoeuvre there was no generosity whatsoever, but rather the selfish desire to control, if not seize with impunity, the remittances in foreign currency that those who have fled send periodically to their relatives on the island. Tourism, the main source of legal foreign currency, has also collapsed on the island (drug trafficking provides more income, but is supposedly illegal), so the regime has had to increase its repression of a population that, dispossessed of everything, has nothing left to lose and defies with its protests a power that is as totalitarian as it is incompetent. 

For this Cuba, which has disappeared from the media spotlight, and for whose tragedy so many theorists of the caviar left and the European far left have not apologised, there is well-founded hope that the new administration of President Donald Trump can change its sad fate. 

So far, both Democratic and Republican presidencies have been unable, or unwilling, to reverse the situation. Now, the presence of a Cuban-American at the head of the State Department, Marco Rubio, may mark the long-awaited turning point. 

In the recent past, Rubio has not managed to impose the harsh measures he himself advocated to reverse social-communist totalitarianism in the three Latin American countries he considers most harmful to democracy and to US interests: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. He is credited with the paternity of the idea of a humanitarian military intervention in Venezuela, supported by at least part of the Venezuelan Armed Forces, during Trump's first term (2016-2020), an initiative rejected not only in the United States by the powerful FBI, but also by the Venezuelan opposition then headed by Juan Guaidó, recognised as ‘interim president’. 

As for the specific case of Cuba, Marco Rubio has been under pressure from the large Cuban diaspora based in Florida, part of which still believes in dialogue with the Castro leaders to reach a pact for a peaceful transition to democracy. However, setbacks in both Cuba and Venezuela seem to have convinced the future head of US diplomacy that both tyrannies would never be dislodged through prior concessions. 

After the opening made in the last months of his mandate by Democratic President Barack Obama, with the lifting of sanctions and restrictions, the Cuban regime ended up redoubling its persecution of dissidents and the brutal repression of any protest against the hardships caused by the incompetence of a regime that still insists on its motto of ‘Homeland or Death’. The black and sardonic Cuban humour in the midst of its tragedy already says that ‘we will have to try with Death, once we have seen what the Homeland provides’ ... 

The lack of prospects and horizons in Cuba has forced more than one million of the island's eleven million people to emigrate. Between these and the former exiles, as well as the new generations born outside the island, it is estimated that almost four million Cubans dream of returning to their country of origin and would not hesitate to contribute financial and human resources to rebuild their devastated homeland. They will only do so if Cuba regains its freedom and establishes a democratic regime. And, as there is plenty of experience of deceit and disappointment, totalitarian tyrannies cannot be removed from power with fine words and prior concessions that do not have the negotiated and promised reciprocal benefits. Marco Rubio knows this; Donald Trump, too. 

Contrary to the predictions of some prophets that the United States would continue to disengage from Latin America, there are strong indications that this time it may be decisive in its bid to remove the social-communist totalitarian cancer from the continent. It may be the last chance to find out what freedom means for Cubans under 66 years of age, the age of the supposedly glorious Cuban revolution. Because the alternative is... never.