Carromero’s Last Days

Carromero's Last Days / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Posted on March 28, 2014

The young Spanish politician Ángel Carromero's days are numbered. It
could be 6 or 666 days, but it will not be a "natural" death. He knows
it and his executioners also know that he knows it. So it must be in his
still-open file in the confidential archives of Cuban State Security.
Hence, the Ministry of Interior (MININT) thugs who let him leave Cuba
contrary to every prediction warned him, with all historical honesty: if
you talk, no one will save you from the long arm of evil.

Rest in peace, Ángel Carromero, witness to totalitarianism in its
terminal phase. Nobody escapes the criminal Castroism in the
democracies. Hence the fascist repudiation that was the Iberian Left's
welcome for this snitch of two assassinations, with the political
correctness that demands we pardon the clan of the Cuban comandantes.

The Spanish publisher Anaya just punished Death Under Suspicion. A book
that the intellectuals will literally turn to shit with their prejudices
and opinions. They don't believe this victim, nor any who come from
Cuba. They don't want to read this kind of gloomy witness to the meaning
of Real Socialism's survival. They don't want to have to—and certainty
not because of a Popular Party politician—stop showing solidarity with
the Real Socialist Revolution. They don't want to believe that Crimes of
the State are possible in the mecca of international anti-imperialism.
Nobody asked this human rights guy, imprisoned in Cuba and in Spain no
less, to spoil the Faustian fiesta of the European Left and its
sentimental Castrismo.

Especially in Spain, where the hatred of everything Spanish that can be
smelled from Havana (the only city on the planet where everyone wants to
be Spanish).

I won't say a single word about the book. There is nothing new in its
pages. It's just a testimony in the face of posterity, so that new
generations will remember, when it pleases them, that at noon on 22 July
2012, in Cuba, the State committed a double assassination against the
human rights activists Harold Cepero and the founder of the Christian
Liberation Movement Oswaldo Payá, our first winner of the Andrei
Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament
(2002), and perhaps also our first Premier when the Castro regime collapsed.

Carromero already spoke. He spoke from minute zero, when men in plain
clothes took him to the militarized hospital in eastern Cuba, the most
vile area of our debased little island. Men in plain clothes who never
spoke at the hijacked trial where they condemned Carromero in Cuba, a
trial whose sentence of four years perhaps even the King of Spain
himself now considers impeccable, such that the Iberian National
Audience literally also throws shit all over this conspicuous case of a
Spaniard* killed at the hands of another Spaniard.

It would not be strange that Oswaldo Payá's death had been agreed to in
advance, beyond the Plaza of the Revolution: perhaps with sectors of the
Cuban exile interested in paving an economic path to reconciliation—the
new reconcentration; perhaps with the quackquackquack Cardinals who, in
the end, practically made Payá a Catholic pariah inside Cuba; perhaps
with the high politics that is cooked up between Strasbourg and
Washington DC, where, far from the thousand and one infertile forums,
everyone agrees that democracy in Cuba has to wait. Contrary to Payá's
redemptive preaching, the last thing they want is for Cubans to
recognize their rights. We have lived too many decades without rights,
why insist now on these desires for freedom that will only destabilize
our region in relation to Europe and the United States.

The Cuban people should express their gratitude for Ángel Carromero's
unarmed courage and they should hurry while he's still alive. But I
suspect that after the testimony of Death Under Suspicion, once again
the idea of Revolution and the idea of crime-without-punishment will be
synonymous with the idea of lack of solidarity.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

*Translator's note: Oswaldo Payá had Spanish citizenship; Ángel
Carromero was driving the car in which he died.

From DiariodeCuba.com, 25 March 2014

Source: Carromero's Last Days / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo | Translating
Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/carromeros-last-days-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/