I confess, Senator Rubio – or Secretary of State – that I do not know who are the architects of this new choreography of powers that, like in boxing, force me to throw in the towel. Not because I lack strength, but because it gets tiring to see the same movie with a different illuminated poster. The rhetoric of freedom administered from offices, democracy packaged in lawyers’ folders, the future of the people written by emissaries who arrive in Miami with the pose of proconsuls and the smile of those who already shared the tablecloth before the table exists, is tiring.
Seriously, are you satisfied with the results in Venezuela? With Iran? With Lebanon turned into a shadow board, with China watching from afar while buying patience and minerals, with Ukraine relegated to the drawer of tired causes? American foreign policy has become a moral casino: you bet in the name of freedom, you lose in the name of realism and you always win in the name of national security. Meanwhile, the people add the dead, the exiles add nostalgia – which in the case of Cubans is something else, because nostalgia for what, for misery? – and the bureaucrats add the signatures.
And now they come with Cuba. Cuba again, that island that some only remember when it suits the speech, when it serves for a photo, for a patriotic event in the living room, for easy applause on Calle Ocho. Cuba, my broken, hungry, watched country, turned into a laboratory of obedience and also the loot of those who claim to save it. They already did it before. They already invented solutions for us from outside. They already confused – confused or approved or imposed? – the fall of a tyrant with the automatic birth of a (communist) republic. They already allowed Castroism to change its uniform, its language, its accounting, without ceasing to be the same: a machine of fear.
Now, apparently, they are preparing another dull, improvised government, with a refrigerated room and other people’s hunger. A government of voracious lawyers, of soulless technicians, of patriots without a curriculum and without a people, willing to steal from the Cubans not only the country but the de jure Constitution of 1940, as if the Republic were a public deed abandoned in a drawer in Coral Gables. They intend to present a Cuba to Trump, like someone who delivers a real estate plan: here will be the transition, here will be the investment, here will be the pardons, here will be the old names recycled with new ties.
We saw it recently in Miami, I am still here, breathing that thick air where exile mixes with hope, fatigue and suspicion. There some presented themselves as if they were the prelude to inevitable power. They talked about fatuous agreements, about the future, about governability, about a supposed new institutionality. But behind the neat vocabulary the old Cuban temptation loomed: replacing the people with an elite, changing a dictatorship for another tutelage, calling consensus what is decided by a few and calling democracy what is born without true consultation.
Don’t tell me that you have to be practical. the word practical It has served to justify too many cowardices. It was practical to look the other way when they imprisoned boys for shouting freedom. It was practical to negotiate with tyrants while mothers cried in front of prisons. Practical was accepting that the exile had to behave well to be heard. It is practical today to design a transition without the Cubans inside, without the political prisoners, without the poor exiles, without those who do not have a lobby or microphone or photo with anyone important.
This article will bring me new enmities, I know it. New greeting retreats, new crooked looks in restaurants, new public insults. I have already seen that mechanism: first they invite you to remain silent as a strategy; then they accuse you of dividing; then they make you an enemy of the cause. The cause, naturally, is them. The homeland is them. Freedom is them. And if one dares to disagree, then one hinders one, one exaggerates, one does not understand the times. But I have learned that when certain patriots get too upset, it is advisable to review what spiritual business – let’s say it with the word of God, when in truth it would be that of the Devil – they have been dealt with.
Numerous puppets, nurtured by millionaires grantshave lightly trampled what many of us have done for years in Europe, in America, in every corner where it was necessary to explain that Cuba was not a sad postcard nor a folkloric dictatorship, but a political prison sustained by international complicities. Now emissaries appear who arrive boasting of being the new government appointed by the United States for the future Cuba. Who named them? Who gave you that key? In what ballot box, in what neighborhood, in what prison, in what bread line were they granted such a mandate? What work at the level of true Cuban intellectuals and businessmen have they sculpted for the country?
This is not about rejecting help from the United States. It would be absurd to deny that a powerful nation can pressure, sanction, open spaces, accompany a reconstruction. But accompanying is not replacing. Helping is not managing. Putting pressure on a dictatorship does not mean manufacturing democracy in a laboratory. Cubans do not need another national salvation committee with a conference accent and an appetite for ministry. They need to recover sovereignty, the law, pay off the historical debt, save stolen property, crushed dignity and the possibility of making mistakes for themselves, which is also part of being free.
Because the danger is not only that the Republic will be stolen from us again. The danger is that democracy will be stolen from us before we release it. Let them give us a mutilated and false Constitution, a supervised transition, a tamed opposition, a negotiated justice and a story where the guilty age in peace while the opportunists rejuvenate in office. The danger is that they tell us: this is possible. And that, exhausted, hungry, distrustful, we end up accepting the possible as if it were just. From the Castros I expected the fraudulent change, from elementary organizations I also expected it, but from the United States government, with you, with Trump, with you, no.
Mr. Rubio, if you really want to help Cuba, start by listening to Cubans without self-proclaimed intermediaries. Listen to the prisoners, the mothers, the censored artists, the ruined peasants, the enslaved doctors, the young people who fled through Nicaragua or by sea. Listen to that exile that does not live by managing tragedy, it also exists and is numerous. Also listen to those of us who do not automatically applaud Washington’s every move because we know, from experience, that empires make mistakes with admirable certainty.
Cuba cannot be another experiment. It cannot be another peace of tombs, another stability bought at the price of silence, another country converted into a showcase for some to declare victory. Cuban freedom does not fit in a memorandum, nor in a private meeting, nor in the vanity of those who are already trying on the dress of rulers. If you are going to talk about the Republic, do it with respect. If you are going to talk about democracy, start by not stealing it from the people. And if you are going to talk about Cuba, remember that Cuba is not yours, nor the Castros, nor the new pretenders. Cuba belongs to the Cubans. Still. Yet. Against all thieves of the past and future. And as the Portuguese writer José Saramago said in relation to the Castros, I now reiterate it in front of his government: “We have come this far.”
