http://www.jornada.unam.mx/004a1mun.php?origen=index.html
Sergio
Eduardo Galeano
Cuba Duele
The prison sentences and executions in Cuba are very good news for the universal super power, who is eager to take out from its throat this irritating bone. They are very bad news, very sad news, news that hurt for those of us that believe in the admirable courage of this very small country, capable of such greatness, but we also believe that freedom and justice march together or not at all.
This is a time for very bad news: as if the terrible impunity of the butchery in Iraq, the Cuban government perpetrate these actions that, as Mr. Carlos Quijano would say, are sins against hope.
Rosa Luxemburg, who gave her life for socialist revolution, disagreed with Lenin in the project for a new society. She wrote prophetic words about what she didn’t want. Although she was assassinated in Germany 85 years ago, her words still resonate: Freedom only for those who approve of the Government, only for Party members, no matter how numerous they are, is not freedom. Freedom is always for those who think different from us. She also said: Without open elections, without freedom of the press, unencumbered freedom of assembly, without an open struggle between free opinions, life vegetates an all public institutions will wither, with the bureaucracy surviving as the only active element.
The 20th and the 21st century have been witness to a double betrayal to socialism: the capitulation of social democracy, with reached its peak under Sgt. Tony Blair, and the disaster of the Communist states turned into Police states. Many of these States have crumbled, without mourning and their bureaucrats now serve their new master with pathetic enthusiasm.
The Cuban Revolution was born to be different. Under constant imperial attack, it survived the way it could, not the way it wanted. Its courageous and generous people sacrificed much in order to stay standing in a world of kneelers. But in the hard road it traveled throughout all these years, the Revolution has been losing the wind of spontaneity and freshness that it blew at its beginning. I say this with pain. Cuba hurts.
A guilty conscience does not prevent me from repeating what I have said, in and out of the Island: I don’t believe, and I have never believed in a one-Party democracy (not even in the United States, where they have one Party disguised as two), nor do I believe that the supremacy of the State is an alternative to the supremacy of the Market.
Those long prison sentences are, I believe, goals agaisnt. They turn these groups that openly operated from James Casos’s house (Bush’s representative in Havana) into martyrs of freedom of expression. Such was the Cason’e liberating passion that he founded the youth branch of the Liberal Cuban Party, with the same class and refinement of his boss.
Acting as if these groups were a real danger, the Cuban authorities have exalted them and have rewarded them with the prestige that words have when they are prohibited.
This “democratic opposition” has nothing to do with the genuine expectations of the Cuban people. If the Revolution had not done them the favor of repressing them, and if Cuba had a real freedom of the press and expression, this so-called dissidence would disqualify itself. And it would receive it deserved punishment, the punishment of isolation, for its noted nostalgia for the colonial times in a country that has chosen the path of national dignity.
The United States, that untiring factory of dictatorships around the world, does not have the moral authority to give democracy lessons to anyone. Yes, it could give lessons on the death penalty from President Bush, who as governor of Texas, proclaimed himself the champion of state murder by signing 152 death warrants.
But do real Revolutions, those that come from below and from inside like the Cuban Revolution, need to learn the bad habits for the enemy they are fighting? There is no justification for the death penalty, no matter were it is being applied.
Will Cuba be the next prey of Bush’s country hunt? His brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida, announced it when he said: We have to look inside our neighboorhood, while the exiled Zoe Valdés begged loudly in Spanish TV “Bomb the Dictator” The Defense Minister, or better, the Attack Minister Donald Rumsfeld explained, not for now.
It looks like the dangerometer and the guiltometer, the little machines that chose the next victims of the universal target shoot, point towards Syria. Who knows. Like Rumsfeld says: not for now.
I believe in a peoples’ sacred right of selfdetermination, any time and any place. I can say it, without any qualms in my conscience, because I said it publicly every time this right was violated in the name of socialism, with the applause from a large left sector when, for example, the Soviet tanks enterd Prague in 1968, or when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
The signs of the decay of a model of centralized power are showing in Cuba, that turn into revolutionary merit obeying orders that come and “guidance” from the summit.
The blockade, and the other thousands forms of aggression, block the development of a Cuban democracy, feed the militarization of power and bring about bureaucratic rigidity. Recent events show that it is more difficult than ever to open a citadel the has been closing in order to defend itself. But these events also show the a democratic opening is, now more that ever, imperative.
It will be the Cuban people, and only the Cuban people, without any outside hands interfering, who will ope the new democratic spaces and who will conquer the freedoms that remain, inside the Revolution that they made and from the deepest reached of their country, which show the greatest solidarity of anyone I know.