The international left sometimes seems less like an ideology and more like a dogma. Many of its organizations and activists are moved by pacts, debts, interests, and not by principles or objectives. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, for example, are capable of embracing current dictators, while turning their backs on other mothers who today fight for justice for their unjustly imprisoned children.
The creed was filled with altars, relics, and prayers, but its aspirations were emptied of their content. The poets and singers gave them their muses with blind fanaticism, paving the road to hell with good intentions.
And that hell burns in countries like Cuba, where no one believes in songs of equality or social justice anymore, because reality hits you in the face like a henchman’s boot. We stop speaking in the future tense, our daily grammar forces us to disguise the future as an uncertain present. Nobody says “I will come tomorrow”, but rather “I will come tomorrow”. We stopped dreaming in Cuba a long time ago, and we escaped en masse towards the American dream or the Spanish siesta.
The oldest dictatorship in the West has accumulated extensive experience in influence trading and diplomatic marketing.
It is extremely contradictory and disappointing that a regime as abusive as the Cuban one retains a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. One wonders: what is the purpose of such an institution, whose judges are notorious criminals? What sense does it make to put the robe on an indisputable rights violator?
It is obvious that the mechanism does not work, it has a factory defect. The oldest dictatorship in the West has accumulated extensive experience in influence trading and diplomatic marketing. They know perfectly well what screws to tighten to obtain favorable votes in international structures. And when the truth makes them completely evident, they have a loyal left, capable of betraying itself to play the discipline of the blocs.
There is nothing left of that utopia of the last century. Each copy of the great revolutionary scam became more dystopian, both in Venezuela and in Nicaragua. In the end, it was never about the people, much less the workers, it was about power, plain and simple. The Orwellian prophecy was more than fulfilled, filling the farm with increasingly bipedal pigs.
Like every religion, the Latin American left also had its sacred books. The Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano, became the Bible of the progress, although the Uruguayan later admitted not knowing properly about economics and politics when he wrote the book. “I wouldn’t be able to read it again,” he admitted in Brasilia, in 2014, “that traditional leftist prose is very heavy.”
I would like to launch a challenge to the Cuban official press: dare to publish the entire Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its center pages, without taglines or manipulations!
Indeed, it was a well-written book, but populist. He simplified complex issues with seductive language; He appealed to emotion, rather than reason; and freed us from all guilt, throwing all our problems and their solutions onto other people’s shoulders. Despite this, Galeano continues to be cited with the same fervor with which the Jesuits quote Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
Another poet in the pantheon is Benedetti. in his poem Now everything is clear, launched the challenge of “a broad international campaign for human rights.” The genius of the verse is unquestionable, but sterile, because in countries like Cuba power is cynically ambidextrous.
All dissidents who have been persecuted, locked up or exiled know this, even if they profess social democratic ideas. The ribs of a young man like Leonardo Romero Negrín know it, the one who once dared to take out a poster with the phrase “Socialism yes, repression no” and they beat him to death. Alina Bárbara López Hernández, the intellectual accused of resistance and disobedience, knows this. Everyone who has tried to create independent unions, without any success, knows this. The teachers know this, whose salaries do not arrive on time, nor are they enough to buy a measly carton of eggs. Doctors know it, they lack everything necessary to save lives, while hotels have everything they ask for to save dollars.
I would like to launch a challenge to the Cuban official press: dare to publish the entire Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its center pages, without taglines or manipulations! Would their owners allow it? Cuba is the country where the police could lock you up if they caught you clandestinely distributing that statement. Cuba is the regime where its henchmen came to shout in acts of repudiation the slogan “Down with Human Rights!”. In Cuba, not even the poetic, although infertile, human leftists are respected.
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