Their Worst Enemy: Babalú's Self-Inflicted Defeat

It was a unique moment in the history of Babalú and it is unlikely that we shall ever see a repetition. It was their intention not to address Val Prieto's outing of Killcastro on Babalú. They could not find the words to address it publicly. Among themselves, in the e-mails that passed between them this weekend -- hundreds of them -- they had no difficulty gloating about what Val had done and mocking Killcastro's pain. It is a pain and anguish that most of them do not empathize with because their families are here not on the island, and though they must have heard of conditions in Cuba, few, if any, have actually experienced on their own flesh the full weight of totalitarianism. We know that Val and Henry do not identify with or even understand the real plight of the Cuban people, who have been held hostage for nearly 50 years by a criminal enterprise abetted by the superpower(s). Their partiality to the sole remaining superpower blinds them in many regards (as it once did the 19th century annexationists) to the real nature of Castro's tyranny and they are more liable to blame the Cuban people for enduring it than Castro for perpetrating it or the U.S. for sanctioning it.

Val's frequent references to rendering the Cuban people in a pressure cooker or his incitements to a bloodbath shows that he regards them as an obstacle to his plans for Cuba. If only they would oblige him by disappearing -- all of them, except, perhaps, some trophee dissidents -- Val and others like him could realize their vision of Cuba as another Puerto Rico, at best, or an island-wide Guantánamo base. Only if you first understand that can you then understand Val's act of outing Killcastro and the reaction of the other Babalunians to it. Killcastro's family means nothing to them, just more sheep to be led to the general slaughter. Their blasé attitude to their fate, the fact that they can even joke and laugh about it, leaves no doubt as to their depraved indifference to human life. In a word, their inhumanity.

Henry's cartoon, "Squashing the Losers," was their collective reply to their blogger critics. But they got a big surprise. For the first time in months, one of their posts caught fire. A surge of commenters -- and God knows how many more whose comments were deleted -- made known to them the revulsion which Val's actions inspired in them. Henry was literally cornered and could hardly defend himself. In the end he was sputtering obscenities and making ridiculous charges like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. We have seen him like this many times before but never so besieged. And then, pro forma, the "Squashing the Losers" post was gone, deleted as many of their posts that just didn't "go right."

We have, of course, preserved a copy.

We shall analyze it in future posts point by point.

This post that, perhaps, would have passed quietly into Babalú's archives will, instead, be kept alive here.

Their efforts to suppress the truth through censorship will doubly damn them

I have always said that Val & Co. are their own worst enemies.