Cuban doctor Antonio Guedes, founder of the Unión Liberal, said Tuesday to 14ymedio that the controversy generated by the presentation in Miami from the book Cuban Privilege (Cambridge University Press, 2022), by American sociologist Susan Eckstein, was a natural response from the community of Cuban residents in the United States.
“Faced with an issue of this nature, within an exile that has suffered so much and is suffering, it is normal and even necessary to offer answers, let’s say sociological, as long as they are peaceful,” Guedes said from Madrid.
Cuban Privilegea study of the immigration policies of the United States towards Cuba since 1959, states –supported by archives and State documents– that Cuban immigrants have enjoyed multiple political, social and economic benefits that other groups of migrants have been deprived of in the same conditions.
Both the postulates of the book and Eckstein’s favorable view of the Cuban regime motivated a protest to be held near the campus during the book’s presentation last Friday at Florida International University (FIU).
“Faced with an issue of this nature, within an exile that has suffered so much and is suffering, it is normal and even necessary to offer answers, let’s say sociological, as long as they are peaceful”
Inside the university campus, where the academic debate between Eckstein and the Cuban politician Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat was taking place, several of the attendees shouted slogans of “Down with communism!”, “Free Cuba!” and “Patria y vida!”, in addition to pointing out his disagreement with the criteria of Cuban Privilege during the public speaking session.
Guedes is familiar with the work of Eckstein, author of several books on Cuba, including the also controversial Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro. “She has always been one of the many left-wing academics who, from American universities, have done and are doing horrible damage to exile,” she says. In addition, Eckstein has repeatedly demonstrated her “benevolence towards the communist dictatorship, from the apparent bourgeois equidistance”.
Regarding the presentation of the book at the FIU, the doctor is pleased that Eckstein found “a high-level answer that demonstrates the false premises and gaps in his book”, such as the one offered by Gutiérrez-Boronat, who put several of the statements that the teacher expounded “lightly”.
However, says Guedes, it is logical that a book like Cuban Privilege arouse the ire of the Cuban-American community. The reaction is comparable to that of other contexts that have experienced dictatorships and totalitarianism.
“What would happen in Israel if a book remotely cast doubt on the Holocaust had been released?” the doctor asks. “What would have happened in Chile, if positive things were raised about Pinochet? Or in present-day Spain, governed by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and Podemos, about Franco? Or perhaps in today’s American universities, with respect to the issues against abortion or gender ideology?
In addition, Eckstein has repeatedly demonstrated his “benevolence towards the communist dictatorship, from the apparent bourgeois equidistance”
However, it is also necessary to qualify. According to Guedes, there has been a “use, abuse and fraud” of the Cuban Adjustment Act for at least two decades. “If someone arrives at the US border and requests that a law designed for people who are persecuted – or at least discriminated against or marginalized for political, religious reasons, etc., and not for those who emigrate for economic reasons – be applied to them, and then they return After a year and a day at the ‘house’ of your repressor, without apparent fear, as a ‘mule’, a tremendous inconsistency is committed,” he says.
This is frequent and unjustified, although it is true that many Cubans had to leave Cuba when their properties on the island were confiscated or nationalized. In this sense, the expropriation process carried out by Castro was closely linked to the political sphere, and therefore Therefore, it was a reason for the reception in the US But this is not a frequent case and the only reason to invoke the Cuban Adjustment Act should be “intimately linked to the lack of freedom.”
“All this is inconsistency, fraud and a bad example for other groups and societies,” Guedes insists. “It is one thing to be exiled and another to be an emigrant, to improve life or for reasons such as wars and cataclysms.”
This does not mean, assures the doctor, that the Cuban Adjustment Act should be eliminated. “But it should be modified, and those who take advantage of it, it is clear that they cannot return happily to where the jailer is supposed to be,” he asserts.
“All this is inconsistency, fraud and a bad example for other groups and societies”
Eckstein dedicates quite a few pages of his book to the “false argument” of political persecution. But if Guedes and the academic agree on something, it is that the migratory mechanisms must be applied correctly. “In this way, not only is the spirit of the law complied with and fraud is greatly reduced,” explains the doctor, “but also a message (an example) is sent to the rest of the world and, incidentally, it does not help to keep the repressive machinery, which is the cause of Cuban exile and emigration”.
There is much more material to discuss about Cuban Privilegesuch as Eckstein’s silence on the contributions of the Cuban community to American culture and even to the urban development of cities like Miami, or the “repressive nature of Cuban communism.”
There are also good reasons for a revision of the Cuban Adjustment Law, but “we must not suppress it,” Guedes settles, “but rather modify it or apply it well, because the causes persist in the communist dictatorship.”
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