A Brief History of BUCL

Resurrecting the dead did not turn out too well for Dr. Frankenstein, but I fear the lesson has been lost on Henry Louis Gómez. I have already written BUCL's obituary on several occasions (see here, here, here, here and here). It seemed impossible to me that Babalú's militant arm could sustain so many successive defeats and be unchastened until I realized that success had nothing to do with its existence. BUCL (Bloggers United for Cuban Liberty) is an amateur show, literally. This and that act takes stage, bombs, but the show continues no matter how many times the gong is rung because the spectacle is, well, the spectacle.

The inaugural BUCL campaign took on the whole nation of Spain and attempted to revive the The Black Legend of odious memory. It chiefly consisted of tagging BUCL stickers on bus stops. They managed to stick one in particular within 14 blocks of the Spanish consulate in Miami, which they announced with no less fanfare than if they had defeated the Spanish at Lepanto. They also wrote (in Spanish!) a manifesto denouncing the Spaniards' explosión (they meant "explotación") of Cuba, which, if nothing else, refuted Castro's claim of 100% Cuban literacy.

Having failed to topple the Spanish government (though BUCL did take credit for Socialist setbacks in regional elections), it next launched its "Campaign for Sting's Soul." Unlike the "Campaign Against Spanish Explosion," it was conducted in English but not on that account more successful. Its goal was to turn Henry's boyhood idol Sting from a proto-communist to an anti-communist in time for a rumored free concert in Havana last year, where he hoped Sting would denounce the Castro regime. This campaign included the traditional protest in front of Versailles Restaurant and dinner afterwards. While there Henry fortuitously ran into Andy Summers, guitarist for The Police, who had come to the restaurant to eat but ended up being the highlight of the protest. Henry approached him for an autograph, engaged him in a brief tête-à-tête and flattered himself that he had made some progress with him. Certain that victory was in sight and to assure that it would be correctly attributed, Henry hired a crop plane with a BUCL streamer which circled the Miami Stadium where Sting and The Police performed. Sting didn't acknowledge the streamer. In fact, he didn't notice the plane.

It was a good long time before BUCL announced the CAMBIO Campaign , which defied expectations by being its most successful to date because it was its least embarrassing. No gimmicks, no grandstanding, no undue attention called to their own efforts or pretensions about them. Their efforts, though, were rather circumstantial. They unveiled on Babalú a painting of a clenched fist in three skin tones as the emblem of its Third Campaign. I never quite got the symbolism of that, nor why it was necessary to replace the already well-known CAMBIO bracelet. The CAMBIO Campaign never got beyond the launching stage. It was eclipsed by Henry's infatuation with the predictions of Nostradamus Dorshner.

If nothing else, the CAMBIO Campaign could have represented a graceful exit for BUCL. But no. After another long hiatus, BUCL returned with the launching this week of its Campaign to Free Gorki. This gave rise to a controvery that overshadowed the campaign itself. The BUCLers requested monies for a publicity initiative to bring the news of his arrest to a wider audience. Their first mistake was to presume that Gorki was an unknown figure outside of Cuba. He is not. The news of his arrest circled the globe without the necessity of privately-generated news releases placed on news wires for an exorbitant fee, the equivalent in journalism of vanity publishing. Their second mistake was to collect monies in Gorki's name without Gorki's authorization or that of his representatives, in effect, undercutting their efforts on his behalf at a crucial moment. There would have been no problem, I think, if the monies collected by Babalú had been donated to defray the costs of Gorki's defense, to support his infant daughter or to launch his almost completed album, "Porno Para Ricardo's" latest battle cry against the regime. But Babalú, as everybody knows, is opposed to providing any material assistance to Cubans on the island that would mitigate in any way their suffering and its ideological purity would not allow any exceptions.

When Charlie Bravo, representing the Cuban Underground, which handles "Porno Para Ricardo's" affairs in the U.S. and internationally, informed Henry that he was not authorized to collect monies using Gorki's name, Babalú, which could not deny that that such a practice is not only unethical but illegal, instead undertook a blog lynching of Charlie Bravo, once again violating its cardinal rule about not dumping on its own. Henry soon realized, however, that he had gone too far and at precisely the wrong time and deleted the censorious post and its even more offensive thread, which RCAB rescued and reproduced here. Henry then sought a truce with the Cuban Underground which was agreed to for the sake of not diverting attention from Gorki's plight with a "turf war" where neither Babalú nor BUCL had any competency.

BUCL's Fourth Campaign was mercifully interrupted by Gorki's release from prison. Now BUCL can claim another "victory" and conclude this charade once and for all. Having already predicted its demise on numerous occasions only to see it rise again with even more catastrophic results, I am sure that we have not heard the last of Babalú's militant arm.