Raul Rivero. Published Wednesday, October 11, 2000, in the
Miami Herald
Those geniuses of totalitarianism forget that South Florida is home to at
least one friend, cousin, father or mother, son or brother of someone in a Cuban
family.
People leave Cuba because there's no freedom. They leave because the
government, in its attempt to rewrite the past, has erased the future. They
leave because of the stagnation and the privations, and because totalitarianism
is tedious and boring.
Although living in such a predictable society may seem superficial, to rise
each morning in this Republic of the Obvious has profound resonance.
The propaganda campaign that covers 24 hours of the radio spectrum, six or
seven hours of the television schedule and the printed rags is so clumsy that it
achieves exactly the opposite of what it pretends to do.
The greatest weakness of the complex native mechanism of ideological work
lies, as I see it, in the vast spaces devoted to discrediting the United States
and all other capitalist countries. Those societies are attacked with fury and
idiomatic license; their vices, mistakes and problems are pointed out with glee.
What's missing is an in-depth, scientific, profound examination of life in those
countries.
It's a sloppy job, buttressed with figures that are never attributed,
figures the average man doesn't stop to ponder because -- among other reasons --
this is a country without statistics that anyone ever could use for comparison.
It's a slap-dash, discriminatory job, as if directed at morons or the closed
society that Cuba was in the 1960s and '70s.
Nowadays, however, people talk with tourists, whom the government has been
forced to admit in order to survive. They write to whomever they want. From time
to time, they read a newspaper or listen to short-wave radio, not just the Miami
stations or Radio Martí. Like stowaways, a few small groups navigate the
Internet.
Life and people are changing, but the propaganda schemes are directed by the
same aging agitators who began to appear in Cuba in the 1960s. Those geniuses of
totalitarianism forget that South Florida is home to at least one friend,
cousin, father or mother, son or brother of someone in a Cuban family. And every
day thousands of telephone calls dissolve the rigid and choleric messages of the
official media.
Every Saturday, the official television shows two movies, almost always
American, dealing with murders, gangsters and swindles. Yet those films carry
social information that our people notice and assimilate.
Cubans who live outside the country come home and talk, and people do
compare their lives. And, of course, those stories usually are more objective --
harder and harsher, even -- than the paternalistic lessons the government hands
down to darken people's existence.
If those ideological savants were coherent and balanced when evaluating the
real problems that beset democracies, perhaps many Cubans would think twice
about plunging into adventure aboard a raft, or would be less starry-eyed and
hopeful about starting a new life in another country.
There's nothing noble in the warnings varnished with the bounties of
socialism. Rather, they are the unhealthy proposals of a devil's disciple who,
in the midst of Hell, tries to convince you that you're in Paradise while he
stokes the fire and bathes you in ashes.
There's none so blind as someone who refuses to see. Likewise, there's no
journalist so bad as a journalist who wants -- or is obliged -- to applaud. It
seems to me that the daily process of indoctrination via the news media raises
the level of national apathy, pollutes the environment and sometimes gives the
final push to the potential for migration that thousands and thousands of Cubans
carry between their systoles and diastoles.
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