The Hopes of Cuba

Cuba is erupting in protest. Starting on July 11, Cubans have taken to the streets in the largest demonstrations since 1994 chanting “Liberty” and “Motherland and Life.”

The Cuban government has swiftly retaliated.

“We call on all revolutionaries to go to the streets to defend the revolution,” said President Miguel Díaz-Canel. “The order to fight has been given.”

And make no mistake, the government of Cuba is still one of the most ruthless in the world. They are willing to kill as many Cubans as it takes to stay in power.

But I believe something has happened, something I’ve seen before in what I call “late-stage tyrannies” in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Tyrannies rule by fear, a specific kind of fear. The fear of the unpredictable.

If the penalty for every minor crime was death or torture, you could live with it as long as you knew what it was that would bring you to the attention of the secret police.

But what was so terrible about communism was that you did not know what would get you in trouble. It could be a chance remark, an ill-timed joke, or maybe nothing you’d ever find out.

So people lived their lives in fear, never daring to speak their minds, never making close friends. Just hunkering down and whenever possible making a break for freedom across 90 miles of dangerous waters on rafts made of junk.

But sometimes the unthinkable happens. People stop caring and start speaking freely. When that happens you know the end of the regime is near unless the government can kill enough of them. At that point it depends on the Army’s willingness to do so. And that depends on whether the soldiers can see themselves going home and facing neighbors whose kin they have murdered.

And one more thing. Dissidents in the old Soviet Union said one thing that sustained them in those dark days was the knowledge that somewhere else in the world there were people who knew they were being wronged.

And in that respect, the response in some quarters in America has been shamefully tepid.

The New York Times attributed the protests to food and medicine shortages. Which is a half-truth at best. There are food and medicine shortages, which is a feature of tyrannies not a bug.

Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have attributed the appalling poverty of Cuba to the American embargo.

A lie, Cuba is free to trade with every other country in the world and has a flourishing tourist industry run by foreign contractors. Tourists from all over the developed world come to Cuba to enjoy the sunny beaches, the resorts run on cheap labor, and the services of Cuban women who turn to prostitution our of hunger and desperation.

And astoundingly, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, himself a Cuban refugee who escaped to the United States in 1960 has announced America will not accept refugees.

“Allow me to be clear: if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” he said.

The charitable explanation is our government would prefer Cuban troublemakers stay in Cuba to continue to make trouble for the regime.

The less charitable might point out Cubans, like refugees from other communist countries, tend to vote Republican.

A Cuban friend who saw her first executions at age three tells me she hopes, but is gloomy.

And I remember something I once heard.
“The dead remember our silence.”

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