The Need for Light

The Need for Light / Lilianne Ruiz
Lilianne Ruiz, Translator: Unstated

"Declaration of the Minister of Foreign Affairs." The article accuses
the U.S. Interests Section in Havana of fabricating an opposition
movement against Cuba's legitimate government, creating dissidents, and
trying to provoke "regime change."

For the first time I feel like a target of attack by the State
dictatorship in the Statement of the Minister of Foreign Affairs
published last Friday the 2nd of November.

I am a student, since a little less than a month ago, in a journalism
course offered by the International University of Florida through the
United States Interests Section in Havana. The first thing I did on
enrolling was to ask if there existed the possibility of studying the
complete career of journalism or philosophy at a distance. But the
answer that the Cuban employee gave me was that the government of Cuban
had cancelled that possibility.

I do not feel forced to give explanations, but to defend myself from the
possible reprisals that the government — which evidently feels
threatened by the exercise of the freedom of expression — might have in
store for us from now on.

To respond the calumny that we are mercenaries of a foreign government
would take this spiritual struggle to the level of speaking the language
of our kidnappers and presumed assassins. It is imperative that they
prove that they can dialogue with us in the language of liberty without
the excuse of pretending that the nation is a military encampment,
faking paranoia.

In 53 years they have not dared to dialogue with the opposition, they
lack the courage because they cannot sustain themselves before the
citizens who oppose the tyranny "of the socialist morality" and its
consequent "legality": a species of dead language without image and that
therefore cannot and does not have the will to express our human rights.

There is nothing easier to read and understand for the whole world than
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it is written in our
image. But it is very difficult to follow the logic of thinking in the
official Cuban discourse because it represents the interests of just a
tiny collection of people in this country who have managed to buy and
terrorize another so many people within the Island, and feed the
misanthropic envy of the radical left in the world.

There is something I want to note, because it is the only note that is
obvious in the text published in the newspaper Granma: "… the impossible
task of converting its mercenaries into a credible movement of the
internal opposition."

We have to start from the fact that the Cuban State has been faking
paranoia as an excuse to reprimand citizens who dare to express
themselves in opposition to their government which is a complete fraud,
including of course the electoral fraud covered by legal loopholes.

I won't have to work too hard to explain that true paranoia is not aware
of the reason for placing blame on another, but the Cuban State does
know why it has chosen the United States as at fault in order to justify
the attack against its own people: the Cuban State, absolute dictator
over the existence of the souls under its jurisdiction, has never
tolerated the political opposition and has rudely denied silencing them,
first by firing squad or incarceration through the "revolutionary laws,"
including Law 88 (the Gag Law), because they know they could not survive
the full exercise of freedoms and the popular will consulted without
coercion.

Again I suggest looking at the text of the judgment against Hubert Matos
in 1959; there, in the words of then prime minister Fidel Castro, who
served as the principal accusing witness (and who explicitly governed
this Island until 2006, and seemed to continue through his whole life to
impose his will), we see the beginning of the most ridiculous campaign
in the legal history of Cuba where this witness creates the crime of
being "counterrevolutionary."

Decades later this modest housewife was surprised that something as
natural as being against some political and social tendency that has
committed so many criminal acts, that has drafted such tricky laws to
incarcerate Cubans, that has never represented in its gigantic discourse
the true size of a single human being, could be a crime.

It cannot be a crime to be against a government and to express it and to
want to change it, not in a revolutionary way, that includes the use of
arms, but in an embryonic democratic way: with the arms of opinion,
including citizen protest. But the detail is that to prevent those
rights, the Cuban State fakes madness, fakes paranoia and the target of
the attacks is the United States, and this faked paranoia also serves as
an ideological alibi to maintain persecution against its opponents.

The most dissident act, in a county of such political hypocrisy that it
would make the "whitewashed tombs" that Jesus referred to in the Gospels
pale by comparison, is to remember decency and to begin to be honest and
objective toward the Cuban reality. It is easy to achieve credibility if
we only remain true to the Christian and humane vocation that we all
have, and exercise it on a scale larger than our selfishness.

In situations like this I can wait for my persecutors, without missing a
single journalism class, reading the Bible first and foremost and
especially the Gospels, and also remembering people like Martha Beatriz
Toque, like Oscar Elias Biscet, like Elizardo Sanchez, so maligned, so
persecuted, at times so long-suffering, so abandoned (by this people
always disposed to exchange its rights for a pittance) and yet, like the
ancient prophets, such victors in Christ and such towering figures.

November 5 2012

http://translatingcuba.com/the-need-for-light-lilianne-ruiz/