When pigeons fly: another sham election
BY ALINA FERNANDEZ REVUELTA
alinacubalibre@bellsouth.net
The newspaper Granma, official organ of the Cuban Communist Party,
recently published the final results of the election of delegates to the
Municipal Assemblies of the People's Power.
According to the 1976 Constitution, the sovereign will of all the people
is expressed through that mechanism and the People's Power is entrusted
with the nation's legislative and constitutional faculties.
Apparently, sovereign will and other faculties have a very fleeting
character on the island, because that sui generis Parliament meets every
six months for a two-day session.
Still, the pretense of democracy must be maintained, so 8.4 million
Cubans had a civic duty recently to elect 15,093 delegates who will take
their complaints and demands to the immovable peak of power during the
next two-and-a-half years.
Surrealism in Cuba is not limited, however, so -- please sit down -- to
electing those delegates. The Cuban government also trained and
mobilized more than 26,000 pigeons. Not just ordinary pigeons! It
mobilized 26,000 Columbia livias -- carrier pigeons, those winged
messengers.
Their participation appears to have been successful, though, according
to Granma, it took the authorities one week to count the votes. But
that's nothing, particularly if you consider that some of the pigeons
that carried the results tied to a leg may have lost their way as they
flew from some remote region.
Some may have been devoured by hungry cats; other may have flown to
Miami, carrying their ``columbograms'' with the ballot totals still
hanging from a leg.
The operation to efficiently count the votes involved the president of
the Columbofilia Federation of Cuba, Aldo González, and presidents of
the provincial federations.
Eberto Borges, for example, in charge of the Holguín federation, must be
on vacation today, recovering from carrying six pigeons (yes, six) to
every village in his province that does not have telephones, telegraph,
tom-toms or smoke signals.
Poor Eberto must be exhausted, after handing out birds throughout the
mountains, traveling God knows how and eating God knows what. It sounds
like the kind of messenger service that might be arranged in a
post-apocalyptic world.
As if that weren't enough, according to the basic manuals of
columbofilia, carrier pigeons must be trained for a month prior to use.
They must be taught, with patience and erudition, to return to their coops.
I would like to take this opportunity to nominate Eberto & Co. as Heroes
of the Motherland. Seriously.
The use of pigeons is not new. On the contrary, according to the Bible,
the oldest carrier pigeon is the one that carried to Noah the message
that the waters had receded, after the global flood.
So, the messengers have flown from coop to coop, reporting on who won
the Battle of Thermopylae, or who was the last beheaded Crusader. All
the way to World War II. This allows us to ascertain that the Cuban
regime likes to keep some traditions alive.
The 26,000 feathered messengers employed this year in another election
of useless functionaries show us once again that the island clings to
antiquity -- both in the use of pigeons as ``technology'' and the
practice of its peculiar and ridiculous politics.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/09/1619438/when-pigeons-fly-another-sham.html
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