Molina stands by 'my truth' about Cuba
By Michael Soltys
Herald staff
After last month's violent incidents at the Book Fair, Cuban dissident
Hilda Molina went "clandestine" yesterday in a discreet fourth-floor
salon of a downtown hotel at an event organized by CADAL (the Centre for
the Opening and Development of Latin America). This time the occasion
was not to present her own book Mi Verdad but the work of a former
political prisoner Jorge Olivera Castillo.
This "very Cuban" writer once believed in a revolution two years older
than himself to the extent of going to fight in Angola "exporting
subversion" — brainwashed but essentially human. Much like the
neurosurgeon Molina, Olivera started to dissent from Fidel Castro's
"Stalinist" regime in 1993 with metaphor as his chosen vehicle, as in
the 15 short stories of the book presented yesterday (Antes que amanezca
y otros relatos). These metaphors describe the existential anguish of a
people compelled to live a lie for over 50 years — the hunger and the
lack of even water which forces people to rob for the black market, even
dead bodies. The regime of the Castro brothers has caused a "genocide of
the family" via intense militarization but also a homophobic hell for
Cuban gays, constantly exposed to blackmail and driven to suicide.
No wonder three million Cubans had fled abroad (many of them showing
absolute contempt for death in doing so), continued Molina. It irked her
that the Cuba of recent years is considered a tourist paradise by many
when this is achieved on the basis of placing Cubans last,
discriminating against the island's own people (including medical
tourism, as she herself well knows).
Molina was preceded by City centre-right PRO deputy Martín Borrelli and
Chilean Christian Democrat Senator Patricio Walker.
Borrelli contrasted the May Revolution whose Bicentennial is justifiably
being celebrated now with the wrong kind of revolution in Cuba, saluting
the memory of hunger strike martyrs Pedro Luis Boitel and Orlando Zapata
Tamayo. He also stressed the threat of Venezuela, where Cuban military
training is now underway, and pointed out that the fuel sale scandals
now being probed helped to finance the pickets who disrupted Molina's
book presentation, among other things.
Walker was optimistic that it was the beginning of the end for the
Castro regime with growing disenchantment even among the global left
after the hunger strike deaths. He stressed the importance of
international pressure, which in Chile's case had forced its dictator
Augusto Pinochet into the 1988 plebiscite he finally lost (all
dictatorships, left or right, are equally bad, Walker stressed, and none
are irreversible, as the case of the Soviet Union has shown) — human
rights should take precedence over principles of non-intervention
without double standards in every international forum, including the
Organization of American States (OAS). But the people itself must be a
protagonist — hence the importance of the Varela Project eight years ago
as a democratic initiative not born in Miami.
The transition towards democracy in Chile must be carefully prepared,
not improvised, Walker said, pointing to Chile's 1990-2010 multiparty
coalition as an example. Within that coalition he praised 2000-2005
socialist president Ricardo Lagos for backing his call for human rights
in Cuba — he was less enthusiastic about Michelle Bachelet, the
successor of Lagos who visited Cuba last year. Now there was a new
president, the rightist Sebastián Piñera, with whom Walker had crossed
party lines to press for freedom in Cuba.
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