The Guajiro Hamlet: Rafael Izquiedo

"To abandon child #1, or to abandon child #2, that is the question..."

"To stay with the wife in Cuba, or take off with the mistress to the U.S., that is also the question..."

On the winess stand, Rafael Izquierdo described himself as a "guajiro." Whatever Izquierdo is, he is no guajiro. The guajiro is known for his noble character, unsurpassed common sense and boundless generosity, but, above all, for the kind of wisdom that all the book-learning in the world will never give you if you weren't born with it in the first place. The Cuban guajiro was the salt and bread of our land. In our country, at one time, to say "guajiro" was the same as to say a man of his word, a man of honor.

Yes, the guajiro might have a dozen women and twice as many children scattered in the countryside, but he always saw to it that the women and his children never went hungry. He would no more sell a child of his to another man than he would cut off and sell his own hand. Rafael Izquierdo, on the other hand, proposes to sell his own daughter to the greatest mass murderer in Cuban history for a few extra spoons of chícharos in his bowl.

I have known guajiros all my life; and you, Izquierdo, are no guajiro.

You are, however, a faithful copy of Fidel's "New Man" patterned on "Che" Guevara, who was simply the old Lucifer in a red beret. To you truth and falsehood are relative terms, relative, that is, to your immediate needs or appetites. Honor to you is the procrastination of fools. You are the culmination of "Che" Guevara's philosophy as well as the ultimate resolution of every revolution: the effective killing machine that also devours its own offspring.

You have betrayed your infant daughter in every way imaginable. You counselled her mother to abort her before she was born and wanted no part of her afterwards. You shut your eyes and closed your ears to the abuse that she endured in Cuba at the hands of her schizophrenic mother, your mistress. When your bedmate won a visa in the immigration lottery, you rushed to apply for a visa yourself, hoping to ride her coattails to the U.S. and ready to abandon your legal spouse and your other daughter in Cuba. When this wasn't possible you broke with your mistress and signed custody of Elenita over to her so she could take her to the United States, knowing, as you did, of her mental history and history of child abuse. Once she was out of sight you were more than glad to put her out of mind: no letters, no birthday cards, no telephone calls — you might as well have buried her, and, in a way, you did.

When your former mistress tried to commit suicide with a kitchen knife, in the presence of your daughter, and her 11-year-old son saved her life and very likely his baby sister's as well, where were you? Enwrapped in a web of concubinage in Cuba, completely indifferent to the fate of your daughter. And what did you do when her son called you on the phone to inform you of what had happened and begged you, in tears, to save them? What did you do, execrable man? Nothing. You did nothing. Instead of applying for a visa to retrieve your daughter — and then no one was stopping you — you chose to do nothing for 7 months. Indeed, you would have continued to do nothing — which you are apparently very good at — if Castro had not ordered you to assert your parental rights in the U.S., rights which, incidentally, don't exist in Cuba.

Castro's motive for doing so was that Joe Cubas and his wife had in the interim sought to adopt Elena Pérez's children. Communist propaganda portrays Posada Carriles as the Castro regime's "Most Wanted" fugitive. This is, of course, a lie. It is Joe Cubas whom Castro hates above all other Cuban exiles because Cubas has actually injured him personally, which Posada never did. Joe Cubas has shepherded to freedom Castro's most prized slaves, his stable of athletes and source of his greatest pride. That can never be forgiven, and by wresting these children whom Joe Cubas loves as his own from him, Castro thought that he could at last have his revenge — a warped kind of poetic "justice," the slaver stealing the abolitionist's children.

The boy's father would have no part of this. He, too, had abandoned his son but refused to make slavery his only legacy to him. He agreed to his son's adoption by the Cubases. You, who had also abandoned your daughter, were persuaded that she was your meal ticket, literally. As Castro eats from the sweat of other men's brows, you wanted to feed from the tears cascading down your daughter's face. You had the example of Elián's father to encourage all your hopes and pretensions. Had Castro not named Juan González a "Hero of the Republic" and given him a seat in the Assembly of People's Power? Why should you expect less for your daughter? The present and future emoluments promised to you must have been great indeed to forsake freedom for you and your family in America. And so you agreed to become the errand boy in this sordid history of revenge with your own daughter as the prize.

On the witness stand — or "battlefield," to you — you revealed yourself to be an angry little man, the mirror image of Juan González, Elián's father, with some refinements; for example, you were instructed not to threaten to take back your daughter with firearms. You resemble him in many other ways — Juan, too, beat his wife savagely and neglected his son. And much worse. But his peccadillos were concealed because Clinton and Reno preempted the judicial process before Juan González was exposed as the monster he is. You had no such luck. You stand before the world for what you are — a liar; a perjurer; a fabricator of evidence guilty of obstruction of justice; an abuser and enabler of abuse, the worst father and worst man that our country has offered to the world as a paradigm since Juan González.

Enjoy your celebrity. There will be no prizes for you when you return home empty-handed, just that profound sense of self-loathing which you are already exhibiting and which you richly deserve to carry inside you for the rest of your worthless life as a failed stooge of tyranny.