Notable & More Delusional Still: "Patrick Henry" Prieto Rides Again

"Freedom isn't going to knock on [the Cubans'] doors and ask to come in. It isn't going to arrive in a package from Hialeah or in the suitcase of a family member coming from abroad. Freedom is going to hide behind hunger. It's going to hide behind pain, it's going to hide behind sacrifice. It's going to hide behind bruises and in a pool of blood. And it's only going to be found when it is painstaking[ly] sought after, sought after with extreme hunger and empty bellies, with broken bones and bloody hands and with sheer desperation. There are 11 million people in Cuba, yet you see merely a handful standing firm in their convictions and against their government. Until that handful exponentially increases, not a damned thing will change." — Val Prieto, judging the Cuban people and passing sentence on them, Babalu blog, October 25, 2007

The rhetoric is worthy of Patrick Henry; the sentiments are not. Patrick Henry said: "Give me liberty or give me death." Val Prieto says: "Give me liberty or give them death." The "them" are the Cuban people.

While starving Cubans "with broken bones and bloody hands" are heroically confronting an enemy with its guns, tanks and bomber planes, Val Prieto will, no doubt, be blogging about it with bloody stumps for fingers. He may even decline an extra beer (although that may be taking patriotism too far).

Meanwhile, the Cuban people are a perpetual source of disappointment to Val. He believes himself to be deserving of another people, a braver people, a better people; one willing to throw themselves into the void in order that he may cross it.

I, on the other hand, am of the opposite opinion. I believe the Cuban people are deserving of a better Val. This Val has no right to judge them.


POSTSCRIPT:


Response to an Anonymous Commenter
I always try to fit what I write to the occasion. I did so when I wrote this post. The presumptiousness and arrogance of Val's comments on the courage (or, rather, the lack of courage) of the Cuban people deserved and received the response it got. 4000 Americans died in the American Revolution. More than a half-million Cubans died in Cuba's 19th-century wars of independence. To suggest that the descendents of the mambises lack courage is a canard. What they lack is opportunity. Two superpowers connived to enslave them for 30 years, and now a lunatic vent on succeeding Castro underwrites his machinery of repression. A people cannot rise in arms that has no arms; nor can they oppose tanks with fists. It was tried in Budapest in 1956; in Prague in 1968; and Tiananmen Square in 1989. It didn't work. In the past, Communism has been defeated in only 4 ways: a military mutiny as in the case of Spain (1936-39) and Chile (1973); direct U.S. intervention as in Greece (1948) and the Dominican Republic (1965); indirect U.S. intervention as in Central America and Afghanistan (1980s); or the internal implosion of the Communist system.

No mass uprising against a Communist regime has ever succeeded in a vacuum. It was the collapse of the Soviet Union that allowed the Eastern bloc countries to challenge their satraps and recover their long-lost freedom and independence. Without the collapse of the Soviet Union, Solidarity and Pope John Paul II would have been as helpless in the face of a Soviet invasion as their ancestors were in 1939 when the Polish cavalry gallantly (and hopelessly) charged Stalin's and Hitler's tanks.

This is what makes the present situation so difficult for Cubans to overcome. The regional hagemon (the U.S.) is perfectly content with Communism in Cuba; it reached an accomodation with Castro a long time ago and fears a post-Castro Cuba more than it does the Castro regime. Any regime, Communist or not, that can contain its citizens within its own borders has the nominal support of the U.S., and it appears that for now and the foreseeable future, only Castro will be able to be America's policeman in Cuba as the U.S. is his policeman on the high seas. The repatriation at gunpoint of fleeing refugees under the "Wet Foot/Dry Foot" policy has literally brought that fact home to all Cubans.

The Cuban people, who are given too little credit by Val & Co., know their neighbor well and will not so much as throw a stone until they are sure that the U.S. is no longer the guarantor of Communism in Cuba as it has been since the days of the Kennedy-Khrushchev Pact (1962). It was not the Soviet Union that was an obstacle to freedom in Cuba. That is obvious now. It could not have saved its backwater client-state at such a remove from it, or under the nose of the U.S. were the U.S. disinclined to allow it. The real obstacle to Cuban freedom is and has always been the United States.

If the U.S. ever decides to stop propping up Castro, dispenses with the empty rhetoric and confronts the enemy within its doors — the long-announced and now consummated spread of Castroism to South America — then and only then will the Cuban people be prepared to sacrifice as their forebears sacrificed to obtain the freedom of which they were robbed in 1959 and not just by Castro.