Plattism:
One More Slogan Against Cuban Americans
By JESUS HERNANDEZ CUELLAR
During almost 47 years, lacking a practical and formal vocabulary,
the Fidel Castro regime used the most improbable epithets to discredit
its political opponents. So we see not only a dictatorship that isolates,
locks up and executes those who think differently, but uses as well
a rethoric closer to the slang of Havana's lower quarters than to
a language capable of explaining covincing reasons and intentions.
In that way adjectives such as "worm," "homeland-seller,"
"traitor," "lumpen," "antisocial," and
many other were born.
In the last decade, when - after the disappearance of the Communist
bloc- Cuba faced a political, economic and ideological disaster, it
was necessary to find a more elaborated concept, whose goal was, not
only to eliminate a defenseless dissident in the eyes of the people,
but also to nullify the Cubanism of an opposition based abroad and
in possession of strong economic resources and reliable documentation
about the years of human rights violations, the submission of the
national sovereignty to a foreing power, violations of the sovereingty
of other nations, corruption and administrative inefficiency.
Thus, something called "Plattism" was generated. It referred
to the Platt Amendment, which was shamefully imposed on Cuba in 1902
with the occupation of the island by the United States, after the
war against Spain. This war put an end to the Spanish domination of
the island, already almost defeated by the Cuban independence patriots.
The amendment, which guaranteed American intervention in Cuba under
certain circumstances, took its name from its author, U.S. Senator
Orville H. Platt. This amendment lived for a period shorter than Castroism
itself. It was successfully eliminated in 1934.
Seventy years after the elimination of the Platt Amendment, the Castro
regime, in its feverish pledge to discredit its opponents, has invented
the above mentioned term, "Plattism," in order to explain
that almost two million Cubans who live in the United States try to
annex Cuba to America. That those exiled Cubans defend more the interests
of the United States than those of Cuba, as if some divine breath
had determined that Castro and Cuba are the same thing. That these
exiled people, said this more as a spit than as a concept, do not
love Cuba, are no longer Cuban and would return to the island to install
a terrible Capitalism, with the vices of the past in their hands,
as eagle claws.
Forgetting that all of its ideological scaffolding was taken from
a brutal dependency on the Soviet Union and not from its own revolutionary
talent, the last formed more by slogans than by ideas, Castro and
his regime, in their neoStalinist phase, fall into scandalous contradictions.
How can we understand that the "terrorist Mafia from Miami"
which "controls the foreign policy of the United States towards
Cuba" is, at the same time, dependent on the Washington's decisions?
The quotations are, no doubt, Fidel Castro's textual words.
It has never been said that, during the difficult years of the Cold
War, Castro pushed Moscow into the devastating African wars. What
was said is that Castro's troops had to be where the Soviet Union
could not "show its face."
It has never been said that Castro influenced the Kremlin to suspend
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. What has been said is that Castro
kept a complicitous silence and lost prestige in that period, 1979,
when he was requested, as President of the Non Aligned Countries Movement,
to demand the withdrawal of the Soviet troops.
An equal image of dependency was exhibited by the Cuban dictator during
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1968, when he justified
before the Cuban television cameras the horrible spectacle of Soviet
tanks trampling the Czechoslovakian ground. What the world remembers
is the immediate rupture of the serious European left-wing with the
Cuban dictatorship, faced with the weight of the evidence.
An identical level of submission and cruelty is shown still today
by the Cuban State Security, after many years of obedience to the
methods of physical and psychological torture learned from the tenebrous
Soviet KGB, whose mastery in obtaining "mea-culpas" without
electrical goads was the envy of the international world of repression.
Is it possible to take in a serious way the "Plattism" thesis,
when it is known that this conspiracy formula was born from one of
the greatest examples of political, economic, military and ideological
dependency in this world? When we know this thesis was created not
for condemning dependency, but for resisting a politically expensive
influence against Castro?
If what Castro means when labeling Cuban exiles as "Plattists,"
is that a sizable chunk of the almost $40 billion of purchasing power
Cubans have in the United States would go to Cuba in the post Castro
era, perhaps the dictator is right. If what he means is that the 125,000
Cuban businesses based in U.S. territory, which generate $26 billion
annually, would go to create jobs and economic development in the
island, probably he is right. If what he means is that the Cuban scientists,
engineers and technicians who have paticipated here in the authentic
revolutions, such as the one of the Internet, the one of satellite
communications, the one of cable TV, and the one of vaccine discoveries,
just to name a few, would go to put their grain of sand in a new Cuba,
then it is possible that the dictator is right.
But it does not sound credible that the man who was described in 1996
by the Washington Post as "the only real obstacle for democracy
in Cuba," is referring exactly to this. It is not his style,
it is not his will. Simply, in his personal and political agony, he
is inventing for certain people in Cuba and for his already very few
international friends, an enemy to destroy, without taking into account
that no more protective masters will come, only the spiral winds of
the implacable judgement of History, that will last through centuries
and centuries to come, and still more centuries.
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