The Death and Rebirth of "Cuban-American Pundits"

Imagine occupying somebody else's house as a tenant and deciding one day, out of the blue, that you didn't like the house or that it didn't suit your needs, and that, consequently, you were going to seal all the windows and doors with concrete blocks and put up a sign on the lawn that reads: "Condemned." This is exactly what Henry Gómez did to Cuban American Pundits. He shut down the blog without consulting its owner and founder, John Roche.

Imagine now Roche's surprise, and Henry's, too, when John unshuttered his house, removed the "Condemned" sign and changed the locks, effectively reclaiming what was his and shutting out the presumptuous former tenant. This is in fact what John did by changing the blog's password.

John's reclaiming of his property sent Henry into a panic. I cannot improve on his own description of his distress:

"[O]ne day I received an email notification that a comment was awaiting moderation [at CAP]. I clicked on the link to approve it but something was wrong, I couldn’t sign in. When I looked into the problem I noticed that I was no longer an administrator. Someone had changed my privileges. It was late at night and I was worried. Had my account been hacked? I sent an email to John Roche, the original Cuban-American Pundit, asking him if he altered the settings. I hardly slept that night. The next morning I was relieved to find an email from John, with whom I had not communicated with in months, telling me that, in fact, he had made the change. I was surprised to learn that despite the fact that he hadn’t posted anything for a long time that he had been lurking and knew about my decision to close Cuban-American Pundits."

Wow. This guy is beyond shameless. Henry actually portrays John as a thief-in-the-night who was "lurking" around his own property and had the effrontery to reclaim something which had always belonged to him as "the original Cuban-American Pundit," and which Henry, not John, had shut down of his initiative without even bothering to consult the blog's owner.

It seems that the good fathers at Belen2 were a little remiss in teaching Henry about the "private" in private property. They made that same little mistake some 50 years earlier with Fidel.

John Roche and Henry have come to an understanding. Cuban-American Pundits will not be shut down, after all. John, Henry and Sr. Cohiba will continue as editors of the resurrected blog, and they will be joined by -- George Moneo! Yes, George, too, is being resurrected, or, rather, rehabilitated a la Communist fashion. CAP is his Elba, or Siberia. He is going to have to work his way back to Babalú's "magnificent cadre of writers," that is, if he can purge those diversionist tendencies which got him kicked off in the first place. Of course, he cannot be trusted to write about politics anymore. So CAP has been turned into a culture blog expressly for him. We would attend to his first contribution in that line but, as I am sure nobody read it but myself and I know already what's wrong with it, what would be the use of preparing an antidote when the poison has not been tasted?

Last year, I reviewed Cuban-American Pundits, whose history is one of the most complicated and controversial in Cuban-American blog history. Even I couldn't sort it out to my entire satisfaction. I considered trying again last week when Henry closed the blog after its last active contributor, Sr Cohiba, moved on to Babalú with the expressed mission of saving it from all the ill-will Henry had fostered for this Republican blog in Republican circles with his visceral hate for John McCain and infatuation with Barack Obama's relative youth, looks, oratory and personality. In his valedictory post at CAP, which was perfect agitprop, Henry even failed to mention that Killcastro and Charlie Bravo were also original CAP members. (Don't look for their posts; they were long ago expunged). One can delete or alter documents and photographs. One cannot, however, airbrush history. Although the picture was altered when it was used on the reverse of the Cuban $1.00 note, Huber Matos is still on that tank with Fidel. There are still people alive who saw him on it and the original photograph still survives.

The most remarkable feature of CAP's "third incarnation" is also highly Stalinist in conception. It is CAP's new "Comments Policy." It is remarkable, first, because CAP has no comments to speak of. In fact, this prolix policy contains more words than were posted over the last year at Cuban-American Pundits. It would be more correct to describe it as an apologia for Babalú's unwritten comments policy. It states that no criticism of the editors or their friends will be published there and that the editors will always have the last word in every argument, as if comment "moderation" did not already stack the odds in favor of the house. [We are proud to have been the first to define so-called "moderation" as preemptive censorship long ago].

We will devote its own post to CAP's Stalinist "Comments Policy," where Henry openly acknowledges and defends every abuse practiced by Babalú on its commenters.

POSTSCRIPT:

Three proud Babalunian caciques (Henry, Ziva & Sr Cohiba) have congratulated George Leonidas Moneo on his debut at Cuban-American Pundits. Not so the Grand Semí Val Prieto. Not just because he is an enemy to "culture." But because he's an enemy to George Moneo.