Castro dead?
Posted on August 24th, 2007 by Jackie Danicki
I cannot help but celebrate the demise of this evil piece of garbage. I wish I could be in Miami to party with the exiles escapees this weekend.
Filed under: Life
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C'est moi
VP of Marketing & Communications for Rackup, but nothing here reflects what my employer or colleagues think. In fact, they probably think it's all cray-cray.
This weekend, I watched an awesome DVD, the German film “Der Tunnel” - rent it, Jackie, if you haven’t yet. Will make you believe in the tenacity of the human spirit against oppression, etc etc, and also? Hot German actors. Just sayin’.
Anyhoo . . .It takes place right after the Berlin Wall went up, and it’s about a group of escapees who got out just as they were building it and who tunnel back in. Why? They’ve got their Democracy and Free Press and One Man One Vote, right?
This is the thing: they left family behind. Family that the film makes very, very clear they would never see again. Or speak to again. The only way the families remaining in East Germany find out how their loved ones are doing is through notes - pieces of paper - smuggled through in pockets and bouquets of flowers by the few people who have [limited] freedom to move back and forth.
That’s one of the great evils of such state dictatorships: the ability to separate you FOREVER from your family. That’s what people in the USSR feared. The lack of a vote, the lack of a free press, the lack of, erm, toilet paper? I’d manage, Jackie, and so would you. Because if you spoke up, they wouldn’t take your TP away. They’d take Antoine.
Now to my point: Cuban exiles do not want the same unfortunate result of their escape to freedom. And this is probably one of the main reasons there is democracy in East Germany and not in Cuba. The folks who escaped the Eastern bloc didn’t get to call mom on her birthday. Or fly home to visit a sister. Or make sure their family’s fuel-shortage, food-shortage, everything-shortage Communist system lives are made a bit easier with hard currency to ease their consumer wants and needs.
Unfortunately, all Communist refugees are not created equal, or at least they’re not created a key voting bloc. All the Cubans had to do was ask Washington to demand access to their families, and Washington obliged. And Castro? Man, that wily SOB played us like a violin. He permitted it all. Why? Because it makes life in his Cuba just bearable enough. Oh, there will always be dissidents, and they’re in his prisons. But a mass uprising? Why would the mass bother? Maria’s weekly call is Saturday, and she’ll catch us up on our grandson’s Little League game.
I disagree with Bush 99% of the time, but in 2004 when he actually instituted a “real” embargo by shutting off most travel and remittances to Cuba, I cheered. Because as long as Cuban-Americans can phone home, fly home, and send dollars home? An embargo doesn’t exist. And neither does a compelling reason to make enough Cubans back home rise up and demand change.