CONTACTO Magazine
By JESUS HERNANDEZ CUELLAR
During almost 40 years, Castroism, lacking a practical and formal vocabulary, used the most improbable epithets to discredit its political opponents. So we witness not only to a power phenomenon that isolates, locks up and executes those who think differently, but uses as well a rethoric closer to the slang of Havana's lower quarters than to a language capable of explaining covincing reasons and intentions. In that way adjectives such as "worm," "homeland-seller," "traitor," "lumpen," "antisocial," and many other, were born.
In the last few years, when - after the disappearance of the Communist bloc- Cuba reached a political, economic and ideological independence not desired by Castroism, it was necessary to find a more elaborated concept, whose goal it was , not only to eliminate a defenseless dissident in the eyes of the people, but also to nullify the Cubanism of an opposition based abroad and in possession of ample economic resources and very strong documentation about the years of human rights violations, the submission of the national sovereignty to a foreing power, violations of the sovereingty of other nations, corruption and administrative inefficiency.
Thus, something called "Plattism" was generated. It referred to the Platt Amendment, which was shamefully imposed on Cuba in 1902 with the occupation of the island by the United States, after that country's war against Spain. This war put an end to the Spanish domination of the island, already almost defeated by the Cuban independence patriots. The amendment, which guaranteed American intervention in Cuba under certain circumstances, took its name from its author, U.S. Senator Orville H. Platt. This amendment lived for a shorter period than Castroism itself. It was happily annulled in 1934.
Sixty-four years after the elimination of the Platt Amendment, Castroism, in its feverish pledge to discredit its adversaries, has invented the above mentioned term, "Plattism," in order to explain that almost two million Cubans who live in the United States try to annex Cuba to their great neighbor. That those exiled Cubans defend more the interests of the United States than those of Cuba, as if some divine breath had determined that Castro and Cuba are the same thing. That these exiled people, said this more as a spit than as a concept, do not love Cuba, are no longer Cuban and would return to the island to install a terrible Capitalism, with the vices of the past in their hands, as eagle claws.
Forgetting that all of its ideological scaffolding was taken from a brutal dependency on the Soviet Union and not from its own revolutionary talent, the last formed more by slogans thay by ideas, Castro and Castroism, in their neoStalinist phase, fall into scandalous contradictions.
How can we understand that the "terrorist Mafia from Miami" which "controls the foreign policy of the United States towards Cuba" is, at the same time, dependent on the opinions of Washington? The quotations are, no doubt, Fidel Castro's textual words.
It has never been said that, during the difficult years of the Cold War, Castroism pushed Moscow into the devastating African wars. What was said is that Castro's troops had to be where the Soviet Union could not "show its face."
It has never been said that Castro influenced the Kremlin to suspend the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. What has been said is that Castro kept a complicitous silence and lost prestige in that period, 1979, when he was requested, as President of the Non Aligned Countries Movement, to demand the withdrawal of the Soviet troops.
An equal image of dependency was exhibited by the Cuban dictator during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1968, when he justified before the Cuban television cameras the horrible spectacle of Soviet tanks trampling the Czechoslovakian ground. What Humanity remembers is the immediate rupture of the serious European left-wing with the Cuban dictatorship, faced with the weight of the evidence.
An identical level of submission and cruelty is shown still today by the Cuban State Security, after many years of obedience to the methods of physical and psychological torture learned from the tenebrous Soviet KGB, whose mastery in obtaining "mea-culpas" without electrical goads was the envy of the international world of repression.
Is it possible to take in a serious way the "Plattism" thesis, when it is known that this conspiracy formula was born from one of the greatest examples of political, economic, military and ideological dependency in this world? When we know this thesis was created not for condemning dependency, but for resisting a politically expensive influence against Castroism?
If what Castro means when labeling Cuban exiles as "Plattists," is that a sizable chunk of the almost $20 billion of purchasing power Cubans have in the United States would go to Cuba in the post Castro era, perhaps the dictator is right. If what he means is that the 103,000 Cuban businesses seated in U.S. territory, which generate $15,8 billion annually, would go to create jobs and economic development in the island, probably he is right. If what he means is that the Cuban scientists, engineers and technicians who have paticipated here in the authentic revolutions, the one of cybernetics, the one of satellite communications, the one of cable TV, and the one of vaccine discoveries, just to name a few, would go to put their grain of sand in a new Cuba, then it is possible that the dictator is right.
But it does not sound credible that the man, who was described in 1996 by the Washington Post as "the only real obstacle for democracy in Cuba," is referring exactly to this. It is not his style, it is not his will. Simply, in his personal and political agony, he is inventing for certain people in Cuba and for his already very few international friends, an enemy to destroy, without taking into account that no more protective masters will come, only the spiral winds of the implacable judgement of History, that will last through centuries and centuries to come, and still more centuries.ƒ
(Translated by EL HERALDO CUBANO, of Sweden, and edited by GLADYS P. MARTINEZ)
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