The Real Enemies of the Cuban People

"The Cuban people's worst enemy is the Cuban people."

Val has submitted this proposition to debate at Babalú. In the "Comments" he makes it clear that he personally subscribes to it, which is tantamount to asserting that slaves are to blame for slavery. This notion, odious as it may sound to us today, was one of the principal arguments used to justify slavery throughout its history. Slavery was a curse because the slave himself was said to be cursed. Of course it was not the slave who had forged his destiny, that is, forged his own chains. Nor, as history would show, were slaves reconciled to their chains but shed them gladly the moment that the entire weight of the state was not directed to keeping them in chains.

The worst enemy of the Cuban people is their slavemaster, Fidel Castro.

Val is so detached from the Cuban reality and so embittered against his countrymen that he is constitutionally incapable of seeing them as victims of the same tyrant who caused his own family to flee to this country.

He begrudges Cubans the scant food that they eat, the rags that they wear and even whatever pleasure they are still able to wring from life despite Fidel Castro, including laughter and sex (see link below). Their natural condition, the only one acceptable to Val, is a collective and continuous hemorrhage that should last as long as communism lasts or as long as the Cuban people last. Then, freed from one or the other (it makes no difference to him), he can realize his dream of returning to his native Bayamo and finding the tree against which he used to pee as a 3-year old and the other landmarks of his childhood. What is a little blood or torrents of blood compared to the realization of that cherished hope? Cruel and ungenerous have the Cuban people been to deny him all these years the opportunity to relive (relief?) la edad de la peseta which he missed out on.

The Cuban people are not responsible for the destruction of our country. They did not opt for national suicide in 1959; they did not tie the noose around their own necks. It was, first and foremost, the United States which delivered us to the scaffold and made it impossible for us to escape as a nation its decree of annihilation. Others, principally the Soviet Union, but also Western Europe, the Eastern bloc, China, Venezuela, and every other country that ever extended a subsidy or credit line to Castro, enabled the henchmen, unharried by any external forces, to practice their foul deeds on the writhing body of our country as a fulltime occupation.

Cubans are not their own worst enemy. The entire world has conspired against our liberty and abetted our enslavement. The world is the enemy.

And, of course, people like Val who exculpate all others in order to blame the victims.

No Food, No Freedom and No Sex Equals Freedom for Cubans, Says Val