Tougher yet for Castro was the ''desertion'' of Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan essayist with lighter literary weight who enjoyed a close relationship with the Cuban dictatorship. He was almost a member of the family, someone whose unconditional support was taken for granted.
After 18,000 executed people, 120,000 political prisoners and 44 years of persecuting homosexuals, Jehova's Witnesses, readers of Mario Vargas Llosa and fans of the Beatles, among others, how could Castro anticipate that the deaths of three luckless negritos -- ''black boys,'' as he calls them -- and the imprisonment of merely 75 opposition members would provoke an uprising among his pampered writers and artists?
The problem is grave. Communist dictatorships always require an international choir of support. The choristers have two key functions:
o To lend their prestige to legitimize a political model lacking in freedoms and economic prosperity.
o To silence the victims' voices, conceal the truth and maintain an image of cheer.
How could Castro be an implacable tyrant when Gabriel García Márquez, that talented and charming writer, is his friend? How could it be true that border guards machine gun rafters and jailers kill political prisoners -- as happened to my friend Alfredo Carrión -- when Mario Benedetti, that sensitive Uruguayan poet, supports the revolution?
This corps of docile sycophants is so important that Castro created a powerful branch of the Interior Ministry to empower it: the Cuban Institute for Friendship with Peoples. A political police that uses maracas instead of pistols, its task is painstakingly laid out in the laborious ''Plans for Political Influence'' that are drafted every year and revised every semester. It consists of seducing famous people -- bribing, flattering and training them -- so that they will parrot the speech about a united, generous and anti-imperialistic revolution besieged by the perfidious Yankees and the wicked ``Miami Mafia.''
SHAMELESS SHOW
Why do so many valuable and intelligent people lend themselves to this shameless show? Several reasons and emotions are involved. Of course, ideological coincidence counts for something, but probably less than vanity and economic interests. The dictatorship uses money and fame as rewards. It publishes books and records. There are prizes, media coverage, praise.
To break with the Cuban revolution is to break with all that. Ask Colombian writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, to whom Castroites in his country mailed a letter-bomb.
Today, a lot of people are willing to pay that price. Castro and the revolution have lost their charm. Both are very old. Both have caused much harm. They have killed and imprisoned people excessively. They have created too much misery, too many exiles, too many informers. Too many bodies float on the Straits of Florida.
The pretext of Yankee imperialism no longer suffices to imprison the country's leading poet, Raúl Rivero, 25 independent journalists, 14 librarians and 30 other democrats, just because they spoke their truths. Much less to kill three young men who -- without hurting anyone -- tried to hijack a ferryboat to escape from that hell.
A VILE MANIFESTO
Castro and his propagandists have tried to contain the scattering. How? With a vile manifesto signed first by Alicia Alonso and followed by the tremulous signatures of 26 Cuban writers and artists who could be listed by Guinness as the people who have spent the longest time on their knees and heads bowed: Miguel Barnet, Roberto Fernán
dez Retamar, Cintio Vitier, Silvio Rodríguez and a shameful et cetera. What do they say? What have they been forced to say? Don't abandon us because the United States will invade us. Poor folks. Castro has already shot them at dawn, but they don't realize it.
[End] www.firmaspress.com
Before examining that, however, let's retire one particularly tired and self-contradictory "argument" against U.S. policy toward Cuba: The embargo is a convenient "excuse" for the Castro regime's failures.
At the minimal risk that a generalization like this creates, nobody who believes in (or at the very least understands) capitalism still holds that Cuba is an economic sinkhole because of U.S. foreign policy. As such, it is foolish to claim that the embargo is an "excuse" for the Castro regime's economic failure. This argument shifts blame to the Cuban people, for their implied stupidity. No émigré I've ever met believes their hardship resulted from U.S. policy. The embargo is an "excuse" only to the Left, for whose intellectual shortcomings I make no defense.
Everyone in Havana knows they receive one bar of soap per month because of decisions made by Castro, not Washington. To argue otherwise is to deny the Cuban people an "insight" most Americans take as common sense.
The most recent way to blame the United States for Castro's brutality is by criticizing the actions of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana. The argument goes that were it not for U.S. diplomats-invariably portrayed by the media and the Left (quibble, quibble) in C.I.A.-like terms-supporting pro-democracy forces in Cuba, Castro wouldn't have to hand out life sentences like candy.
This is an insidious form of blaming the victim, along the lines of a domestic abuse counselor inquiring, "Why didn't you stop complaining after your husband hit you the first time?"
If only those pesky Cubans didn't want freedom so badly and the U.S. government wasn't so willing to help them, Castro wouldn't have to play the stern father.
What appears to be an attack on American actions turns out to be a much harsher attack on those who support American values from abroad. Imagine blaming the Berlin Wall jumpers for forcing the guards to pick them off like tin ducks in a carnival.
Moral relativism is a valued tradition for the Left, but some on the Right also equate a principled policy decision with the type of restrictions on freedom implemented by Castro.***