HAVANA, Cuba. – They don’t reach 150 the released political prisoners, and those who are currently in their homes cannot be said to be “free”, while the very high possibility of returning to prison weighs on them as soon as the regime is once again presented with the opportunity to use them as currency.
They did not come out for pardonnor under any other legal formula that completely extinguishes the sanction and wipes the slate clean with what should never have been considered a crime (peaceful protest, the right to demonstrate, freedom of expression and of the press, political opposition ) but by a ruse in which mediators and counterparts ended up offering more than what they received because, seen from the perspective that no prisoner was released but only provisionally released from confinement, under the condition of strict silence, they have been given a piece of cake. .
Perhaps for former President Joe Biden, who could have punished those who did not vote for him in Florida, what he received was fair and sufficient, but in reality what they put on the negotiating table is something like a wad of CUC, a minimum transfer of MLC, but no hard currency but just those inventions, those scams, that the dictatorship creates to pretend to pay and always keep the real money, leaving the fools pleased.
Because always, when we talk about the “trick coins” and “barter” invented by the Castro dictatorship (which, let’s understand once and for all, is exactly the same as saying GAESA) we forget that beyond those that circulate or have stopped circulating in the Island’s finances, there is one, the most important of all, which are the political prisoners without whom the system would not be able to function the way it does, that is That is, from negotiation table to negotiation table, whether with the United States Government, with the European Union and even with any creditor who brings up the issue before the checkbook or the commitment to defer or forgive a debt.
An easy currency (that does not need to be printed or backed by actual dollars) and without a doubt the most valuable among those they keep in their pockets, not because its use exonerates them from using the others in “transactions” (the two almost always go together). but because it also serves to clean up what the others would dirty, that is, to show an image of a dictatorship that softens, willing to listen and forgive, because that is how its interlocutors like it, even if they know that it is only a disguise, After all, who doesn’t use it these days?
The regime is aware of these political hypocrisies, as well as the value of always having a few political prisoners kept in its vaults even when they are completely empty of banknotes, because they are the only guarantee of refilling them with cashso that dollars entering the Cuban economy will always be synonymous with political prisoners leaving, although only enough to guarantee another round of talks, at the same time that the fear of prison persists in Cuban society as the main method of control.
This detail is of course known to guarantors and interlocutors. It is put first on the dialogue tables, for everyone to see, and that is why it is difficult to understand that they are not aware of the repressive practice that they encourage (and intensify) in the meantime, by accepting political prisoners as the only currency of Instead, in addition to becoming accomplices of the dictatorship, they infinitely prolong that cycle of hunting and release that literally puts them in “circulation” like any other monetary resource.
If the “transaction” (because it is not at all an exchange) of political prisoners is not accompanied by a mandatory democratization process, or at least a commitment to a truce or immunity, even supervised by external entities, it cannot be considered. from the ethical point of view as an act of good will, much less as progress in diplomatic relations, and therefore does not represent support or help to the forces that seek political change in Cuba aimed at the reestablishment of democracy.
All of us, including families who have been reunited (although only provisionally), should be aware of the damage caused by accepting the “release” (and not the definitive release of political prisoners) as a bargaining chip, especially when in At the conversation tables, true freedom – for the demand and public exercise of which today hundreds of people continue to be imprisoned as criminals – has been flatly discarded by the parties, reinforcing the regime’s strategy of always keeping at hand a good stocks of political prisoners, which is an undoubtedly terrorist practice.
There is nothing, besides hunger, that causes more terror among Cubans than realizing that there is a cycle of political repression associated with the cycle of urgent need for liquidity by a regime that has no problem turning the citizen into currency, in transforming “political indiscipline”, dissidence into crime, even in passing it off as a common crime.
Nothing is more terrifying than associating the decline and failures in the economy, even hunger, with the increase in arrests and imprisonment with the sole purpose of preparing a new load of prisoners for the next transaction.
But everything conspires at a global level for the normalization of such cycles, and it is up to us alone to put an end to them with the only options left to us: disobedience, persistence in the demand for freedom, the necessary rupture of that narrative that persists in seeing to the military as a parallel force to the regime and not as its true body, plus the refusal to be treated by them as if we were a CUC, an MLC, a “Classic” card or any of the financial inventions that they put into circulation with the pretext of “saving the economy”, which means perpetuating themselves in power.
