by Alberto Reyes Pías
I have been thinking about speaking without filters.
The prefrontal cortex was a great invention of the Creator. It is the filter between what boils in our brain and what we decide to share; it is the structure that allows us to choose to be “politically correct.”
But today I am going to disconnect my prefrontal cortex, and I am going to speak without filters.
Many media outlets have echoed the “alarm” over the “growing escalation of tension between the United States and Cuba,” an elegant phrase used to “denounce” the abuse of the giant of the North against the small and defenseless Caribbean island.
But those media only see the situation at the level of governments and completely forget a third variable: the people of Cuba.
For many years now, the Cuban people have not identified with the Cuban government.
If the United States were to take action, say, against Norway in a Venezuela-type scenario, the people and the government of Norway could be considered as one; but in the case of Cuba, that is not so.
We are a kidnapped people, subdued, bound by those who hold power. We are a people who for years have been trying, from a position of vulnerability, to put an end to decades of repression and misery. And it deeply bothers us—without using coarse language—that the same people who today condemn Stroessner, Pinochet, or Franco as dictators seem not to realize that since 1959 Cuba has had a dictatorial, repressive, oppressive system—one in which they themselves would never live, nor would they ever bring their children to live.
Because dictatorships, let us remember, flourish both on the Right and on the Left.
And now, when voices are raised from the United States calling for freedom for the Cuban people, that is labeled abuse and interference in sovereignty.
To begin with, the Cuban people are not to blame for anti-American complexes. Whoever has them should channel them in some other way instead of placing ideology above the hunger and misery of an entire people.
In fact, this would be precisely the moment to support the proposal of the United States and to demonstrate that nations that proclaim themselves democratic have the decency and courage to defend the freedom and true sovereignty of ordinary people—those whom their governments have turned into hostages.
On the other hand, let us not be hypocrites. In the victory over the Germans in the Second World War, to give just one example, American intervention was decisive—a gesture that no one bothers to criticize.
My metaphor is this: if I had an eight-year-old son, and another child of his same age, height, and weight bullied him, I would be the first to tell him to defend himself. But if a fifteen-year-old teenager bullied my eight-year-old, it would not occur to me—or to anyone—to ask him to face it alone. On the contrary, we would immediately run to stop it. From where? From a stronger power.
The Cuban people have done what they could up to now, and continue to do so in a thousand ways. But I repeat: we are an unprotected society, without rule of law, with a civil structure meticulously dismantled over nearly seventy years. We are a vulnerable civil society at the mercy of repressors who hold great power.
Without the help of someone stronger, like the United States, all that remains for us is to sink deeper and deeper—until we die and watch our children die. Even while perhaps, before exhaling our last breath, we hear those philosophers who dislike today the US demonize the people who are doing something for our freedom without understanding our plight say, from a cocktail bar in London or Paris:
“Oh, how admirable the people of Cuba were, how they resisted to the very end!”