Diplomacy, yes. Democracy, what for?

Diplomacy, yes. Democracy, what for? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Posted on April 3, 2015

The potential complications of the renewed diplomatic relations
between the U.S. and Cuba.
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

It was about time. Uber taxi drives agree. Academics agree. Minority
leaders agree. American social activists agree. Radio, TV and press
editors agree. Even comedians agree. It's the only point of consensus in
the polarized US politics. No need to argue anymore. The left was right
and the right was wrong. Time to move forward. At least in this issue:
Yes, We Can (a cloned slogan from the socialist Sí Se Puede in the
posters and parades of La Habana). After 50-plus years of US diplomatic
stalemate and economic sanctions against Cuba, with Fidel Castro almost
a nonagenarian and his brother Raul to step down from presidency in
2018, the road to transitions on the Island, as in 1898, starts in
Washington, DC.

A secret agenda had been held for 18 months, unbeknownst to the US
Congress and the Cuban Parliament, but sanctified by the first Latin
American pope. In a reenactment of the US-China ping-pong engagement,
even the sperm of a Castro's spy was gently exported from a US federal
prison to beget a new life in Revolution Square. The long-sought family
reunification as the libidinous metaphor of the national reconciliation
about to come.

The climactic hallmark was on December 17th, as a fulfilled promise on
the day of San Lázaro Babalú Ayé, with two simultaneous speeches running
in parallel windows of millions of web-connected computers all around
the world except in Cuba: in one, the democratically-elected American
president Barack Obama; in the other, the dynastically-appointed Cuban
general Raul Castro. The former wearing the civil elegance of his suit
and a hi-tech reading device; the latter in military uniform, rescuing a
picture from his violent years before the Revolution in the fabulous
fifties, and reading from pile of paper. Quite a pluribus duo, without
liberty but with diplomacy for all.

Calls immediately exhausted the batteries of my Chinese mobile.
Everybody rushed for a quote about the end of the Castrozoic Cold War
Era. Only The New York Times was involved enough as to bet on a series
of op-eds published weeks in advance (by the way, for over a decade now
they also have prêt-à-porter the obituary of Fidel Castro by Anthony De
Palma). Some American Cubanologists, like Peter Kornbluh and David E.
Guggenheim were conveniently located on the Island that noon. The
popular reaction was overwhelming, they claimed. Tears should have come
to my eyes, according to the emotional interrogation imposed to me until
my smartphone was silenced.

A silence that lasts until today.

Barack Obama told the truth in his allocution: "The United States will
reestablish an embassy in Havana, and high-ranking officials will visit
Cuba." Raul Castro lied with impassive impunity: "We have also agreed to
renew diplomatic relations." But this is still not the case.

It's too early to pretend to demonstrate my skepticism. Or cynicism. As
a good Castro subject I know that time on the Island means not money,
but more system's status quo. To keep begging for US bank credits, the
Revolution first needs to buy time. This is what biopolitics is all
about. A family fighting to secure a second Castro generation in
complete control after Fidel's and Raul's eventual deaths. Necropolitics.

Obama's hope was to reopen an embassy in Havana ahead of the Americas
summit on April 10th, as he declared to Reuters on March 2nd. In fact,
the US Interests Section in Havana has been for years the largest
diplomatic mission in Cuba, and no special budget needs to be considered
to reestablish the formal status lost in 1961.

Yet, Castro's hope might be to push back the US engagement to an
intolerable limit of stagnation. Havana insists now that the term
"normalization" will remain an absurdity while the US keeps Cuba on the
list of states that sponsor terrorism. A list currently under expedited
revision, as to the State Department to please the Cuban demands. The
Democratic White House cannot afford to welcome a Republican president
without having its job done —with or without Gitmo, for or against Radio
Martí, plus or less the billions requested by Cuba as a historical
compensation for decades of US embargo.

As the good-spirited Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere
Affairs Roberta Jacobson flies to and from Havana, she's been forced to
smile for a selfie with Josefina Vidal and Gustavo Machín, her
counterparts of the Cuban foreign ministry. Technically, her company is
sign of prepotency in the time of appeasement, since in November 2002
Machín was expelled from the US in retaliation for the Ana Belen Montes
case —a Castro top-level spy at the Pentagon— while in May 2003 Vidal
voluntarily left the US, when her husband Jose Anselmo Lopez Perera
—First Secretary of the Cuban consulate in DC— was also expelled for
espionage.

After the mass media catharsis of the first round of talks last January,
the third one ended in a hermetic "professional atmosphere" according to
the Cuban official report, as abruptly as it was announced, and "with no
breakthrough on sticking points in an atmosphere of rising tension over
Venezuela", as recognized with concern by the The New York Times.

The State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to explain why she
announced "positive and constructive" progress in the discussions. She
has now renounced to setting any "timeline or a deadline." Again,
totalitarianism is as much about tyranny as about manipulation of time.

The last speech of Raul Castro in Caracas in support of the regime of
Nicolás Maduro came as an ice bucket water challenge: "The United States
should understand once and for all that it is impossible to seduce or
buy Cuba nor intimidate Venezuela" [APPLAUSE] and "we won't concede one
iota in the defense of our sovereignty and independence, nor tolerate
any interference or conditioning in our internal affairs" [OVATION].
With their monologic belligerency in the Summit of the Americas in
Panama, they will "expose the mercenaries who present themselves as
Cuban civil society as well as their employers."

I won't travel to Panama this time, but I am worried of what could
happen to my colleague and friends there, faces with the para-civil
society that the regime is organizing as platoons of governmental NGOs,
as we all know that on this Island to "expose the mercenaries" means
routine repression by the political police: family harassment (Omni Zona
Franca Community Poetry Festival), censorship (Hip Hop Rotilla Annual
Festival), defamation (independent blogger Ernesto Morales), job
dismissal (intellectual Boris Gonzalez Arenas), imprisonment for years
with or without charges or trial (Sonia Garro), not paramilitary but
paracivil beatings (Roberto de Jesus Guerra, director of Hablemos Press
free-lance agency), temporary or permanent invalidation of travel
documents (activist Antonio Rodiles and performer artist Tania
Bruguera), repudiation mobs with or without throwing red paint (Mercedes
La Guardia Hernandez) or tar (Digna Rodríguez Ibañez) on the dissidents,
most of the time women —despite pro-Revolution feminists worldwide— and
Afro Cubans —despite pro-Castro race activists worldwide, and selective
extrajudicial killing (Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero from the Christian
Liberation Movement in July 2012).

Besides, after the nth resurrection of Fidel Castro last month he left
an untimely text for the record: against "the eccentric politics" and
"brutal plans of US government" Cubans and Venezuelans are united and
"ready to shed the last drop of their blood for their country". It was
not only the senile nightmare of a García-Márquez caudillo, because a
Cuban government official note denounced the executive order to consider
Venezuela a US national security threat as an "arbitrary,
interventionist and aggressive" move from President Obama.

Maybe we'll see in Cuba the masquerade of new investments and markets
and local licenses for businesses and more access to the internet and
even an electoral reform after the migratory reform, but each and every
one understood as concessions, with no fundamental freedoms guaranteed
as long as one and only one Communist Party keeps monopolizing all
political life, with State Security from the Ministry of the Interior as
the real source of governance of a model based on coercion more than in
a responsible citizenry, able to self-organize to participate in life
after Fidel.

Is the Cuban self-transition from dictatorship to dictatocracy under way
with the US as a new geopolitical ally? Time will tell. It will not be
the first example of authoritarian regimes mutating into Socialist State
capitalism for the sake of regional stability. As the assassinated
leader Oswaldo Payá stated many times, we Cubans have the right to have
all of our rights recognized beyond any dispute or complicity among
power elites. Why what has been good for Americans since the Eighteenth
Century is not good for Cubans today? Is it too impolite to peacefully
demand that the Cuban people be consulted in a free and safe referendum
about the destiny of our nation?

Democracies seem guilty of their duty to foster democracy worldwide, but
Castroism is more than proud to Castrify democratic countries and still
play the victim. Anyway, even if this is a small step for democracy,
it's also a giant leap against decency, since Cuban sovereignty is
sequestered by a government that cannot be held accountable by our own
people. Maybe this is another victory for The End of History: from our
War against Spain to the anti-Imperialist Revolution, the growing
"Common Marketization" of international relations is what really counts
at the end.

Certainly it is good news for America that the cry of "Yankees, come
home" echoes for the first time in our continent. In fact, as we keep on
leaving in migratory waves to the US —both legal and illegal— Cubans are
making space for Americans to reforest the Island. Since the nuclear
missile crisis of October 1962, these "human missiles" have been used as
a pressuring position by Havana in its undiplomatic relations with
Washington, DC, at least while the Cuban Adjustment Act, which
privileges Cubans to apply for a permanent resident status after one
year and a day in America, remains in place.

Unfortunately we Cubans got accustomed to voting with our feet in a sort
of pedestrian's plebiscite. Let's see what the US embassy will imply in
terms of profits and principles for the labyrinth of Cuban liberty.

31 March 2015

Source: Diplomacy, yes. Democracy, what for? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/diplomacy-yes-democracy-what-for-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/