Repression by Episodes

Repression by Episodes / Yoani Sanchez
Posted on May 12, 2014

What does the insect caught in the web feel as it watches its predator
approach? What are its thoughts in the seconds between the anticipation
of the attack and death? It must be a lot like the days in which a
repressive trap is built around an individual, a group, a society.
Similar to that script that builds the justifications for a blow,
molding public opinion, filling in the archive that will later be
presented to the press or the courts.

The current strategy against the Cuban opposition resembles the slow
creep of the spider's legs toward its victim.

We are living in a soap opera episode-by-episode, an attempt to demonize
technologies and the dissidence, who knows if to repeat those dark days
of the Black Spring of March 2003. The blow approaches, in the
insistence in which the press repeats certain refrains, its obsession
with themes like Zunzuneo and trying to link it with the violence of
four supposed terrorists recently discovered in the country. Like in a
bad TV show, the threads are showing in the tying together of mobile
phones, Twitter, death and war. Fortunately these soap operas barely
work any more on a Cuban public too focused on their daily needs,
overwhelmed by material shortages, saturated with ideology and obsessed
more with escapism than with civic consciousness.

The trap is almost set. Will it be used? Who knows. But there's not much
that can be done to stop it, except to denounce it. At the end of the
story the spider is always bigger, stronger, more imposing.

12 May 2014

Source: "Repression by Episodes / Yoani Sanchez | Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/repression-by-episodes-yoani-sanchez/