Castro vs. the Cuban People - Where was the President?

Castro vs. the Cuban People: Where was the President? / Orlando Luis
Pardo Lazo
Posted on July 23, 2013

With a speech that lasted 35 minutes, Commander in Chief Raúl Castro
destroyed the very last traces of the New Man that would complete the
1959 Castroist revolution. In doing so he created a paradox in which a
leader accused the masses of living without moral and civic values:
Without honesty or decency or shame or modesty or honor or sensitivity
or solidarity.

Raúl Castro (who is also the First Secretary of the Cuban Communist
Party and President of the Council of State) made this condemnatory
speech on July 7 during the 8th Legislature of the National Parliament.
At times, the General seemed to be on the verge of ordering an ethnic
cleansing of the Cuban nation. He threatened to impose discipline at any
cost, even though we Cubans are used to that after more than half a
century of watching the government use repression as a mechanism for
creating consensus and governability.

So, the governing elite is now discovering that the island is in ruins,
and that its raw human material is reprobate at best, guilty of: Theft,
impunity, squatting, black-market dealing, noncompliance with working
hours, illegal slaughter of livestock and endangered species, breeding
animals in the city, hoarding products in short supply and reselling
them at higher prices, illegal gambling, bribery and perks, harassment
of tourists, computer hacking, drunkenness, swearing, and littering in
public (as well as defecating and urinating in parks and on the street),
graffiti, pounding music, academic fraud, vandalization of phone booths
and pylons and even drains and traffic signs…

For speeches similar to Raúl Castro's most recent one (what we can call
a Cubanicide), many people who are critical of the socialist system have
been officially punished with ostracism, stigmatization, jail, exile,
and death.

The question that never gets answered is this: Where were brothers Fidel
and Raúl Castro while Cuba was falling to pieces? Were they ignorant or
inefficient or indolent?

From Sampsonia Way Magazine

22 July 2013

Source: "Castro vs. the Cuban People: Where was the President? / Orlando
Luis Pardo Lazo | Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/castro-vs-the-cuban-people-where-was-the-president-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/