Dialog, Why?

Dialog, Why? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Posted on April 21, 2014

In my country, for more than half a century, the government hasn't
dialogued with anyone. The Cuban Revolution doesn't recognize any other
interlocutor than itself, incarnated in the figure of the Maximum
Leader, the now decrepit Fidel.

Executions, thirty-year sentences, perpetual exile. Whoever wanted to
dialogue in Cuba ended up in one of these three categories of tropical
totalitarianism.

Even today, in the 21st century, with a dissidence that has occupied
certain alternative spaces of expression at the cost of much sacrifice,
the Cuban gerontocracy has to die in power without having crossed words
with anyone, except its own clan, the so-called "historic" generation.

Dialogue with the Communists, thus validating elections and other
hypocrisies, is always a deception or a trick. The Communist have
nothing to say, its not their international mission. They only follow
the orders of a political party that incarnates their own dogma. They
are soldiers dressed as civilians.

The idea is to take power at any cost and to never let it go in any
peaceful way. There is a stage in which the Communists simply annihilate
their adversaries. And there is another in which it is pertinent to
sweet-talk the opponent with masquerade of a dialogue.

That is why Communist parties were illegal in so many countries for so
long, a reasonable law by simple instinct of self-preservation. But
today the democracies feel ashamed for being democracies–they carry a
complex about being better in the face of the worst–such that no one is
willing to defend the democratic establishment, either in the first
world and in the developing nations.

So the Communists in Latin America, for example, although they are not
all called that, now mine our social systems in blessed peace, and the
entire continent tends as a bloc to violate citizens' basic rights.
Every caudillo legitimately holds his presidential seat for life, always
with a red star in the logo of their respective parties.

Personally, I don't believe that a party of violent inspiration and
intolerant rhetoric should participate in the democratic game in any
era. In Cuba, after fifty years of the Communist Party hijacking
political life, it's clear that there will be no democratic transition
without the disintegration of the Party. And without making it illegal
for a time perhaps similar to the despotic half-century of the Cuban
Communists, whose contempt for dialogue soon became a contempt for decency.

In Cuba, a few days ago, TeleSur broadcast live and direct the dialogue
between the opposition and Venezuela's dictators. An opposition which
unfortunately now has no other option than to sit at the dictatorial
roundtable, provided it is authorized, and at the moment in which it
best serves the powers-that-be to buy time to cauterize the popular
protests, criminalize their leaders, and at the end of the day
perpetuate themselves.

Venezuela's rulers know well what they are doing. They are "dialoguing"
for perhaps the last time. Soon they will not have to bother with these
desperate deployments, where the entire planet is disturbed, but lazily
so, by their hegemonic manias.

Soon the H in Havana will prove to be much more than a silent deadly
letter. If there is no awakening among the international community, if
the Venezuelan democrats who have given the best of themselves (their
lives) are abandoned to their fate, as in their moment the world
dismissed several generations of Cuban democrats, the made-in-Castro
Communism will feel the impunity of falling, like a silent wasteland
upon our future, always so futile in so many nations.

19 April 2014

Source: Dialog, Why? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/dialog-why-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/