If Ignacio Giménez knows anything about Cubans, it is having well identified what can “mobilize” them and even drive them crazy.
HAVANA, Cuba. – Many of us thought that Ignacio Giménez’s most recent delirium would not have the “success” that it had, but even the Ministry of Tourism was forced to issue a note to stop the mob of delusional people who, once again, as if they had not found out about the previous deceptions, took the old man seriously and got up early—as well as to buy the bread from the notebook or rectify the turn for the gas bullet—lining up at the entrances of several hotels, demanding the $1,100 promised and, most astonishingly, refusing to accept that they were once again deceived.
What happened, leaving aside the feelings that alienation can provoke, rather than the naivety of the people who came, could be worthy of a hilarious comedy, and perhaps, now that the days of the terrifying Havana Film Festival are coming (always at the service of repression), the filmmakers who traveled to the Island to seek “inspiration” in the blackouts, the accumulated garbage, the diseases and the hunger, already have better substance for that script – necessarily surreal when the Castroism is about—that could play with the aesthetics of Luis Buñuel, of Titón, even with the darkest and most cartoonish of Tim Burton.
It could be said that Ignacio Giménez is a madman, a “HP” without a soul and “without a home”, but we will also have to accept that he has been “inspiring” – more so for those memes than for the filmmakers—although his claims as an instigator, under the precept that “the end justifies the means,” have been totally unsuccessful.
Not because, in principle, his deception was just that, a joke or a delusion, but because his plan of uprising – assuming for a second that he actually had one -, if on the one hand he intended to use in his favor the terrible memory of some Cubans and their servile nature in the face of power – identified by habit with the senile -, on the other he ignored that other essential component which is political apathy – derived largely from an “induced mediocrity” -, suffered by the majority of Cubans, especially the most “domesticated” generations in the eternal “construction of socialism”, as a consequence of having believed for more than half a century in the follies and deceptions of a similar old man, who promised and never fulfilled things more impossible to believe, and about which more than one anthology circulates around.
Deceptions such as producing more beef in order to surpass Brazil as an exporter, or more oranges than Florida, or so much electricity to sell to neighboring nations. And although all of this, together or separately, weighs, is worth and chokes us more than the gift of 1,100 dollars, we believed it, and if we didn’t believe it we put up with it, but we never revolted against the lying boss, nor against the brother who came promising openings and milk glassesnor against the one who replaced him with worse lies, promises and even combat orders.
Against the deceptions and nonsense of that other great scammer, who died peacefully at Punto Cero, laughing out loud at those same gullible people now summoned by Ignacio Giménez, thousands of alerts and warnings have been launched for years – dismantling them with figures and documents, with testimonies from victims and followers – however, despite evidence and confidences, being themselves in their deep misery the result of so much accumulated lies, The fools persist who imagine a different economic scenario, better, if Fidel Castro were alive!
This deformation of reasoning, as a consequence of a prolonged collective trauma or an almost pathological opportunism, could explain that reflex reaction, typical of a school, in those who went to the hotels despite so many calls for sanity on social networks for days, even with direct interventions and comments on Ignacio Giménez’s very wall, unmasking it.
Even so, people went to the hotels, with the same punctuality with which we see, possibly the same, attending parades, marches, repudiation rallies, volunteer work, CDR guards. With similar resignation, disguised as “happiness”, with which they come to receive and applaud Miguel Díaz-Canel when he sneaks into their own neighborhoods with more lies and no help or solutions to the problems.
They went to the hotels to demand the promised dollars, but among them very few ever dared to stand in front of a regime institution to complain for more important things such as a child or family member who is a prisoner of conscience, for abusive salaries and social experiments, for economic packages and abandonments, for the sick without medical treatment and for those who die from unknown diseases that have well-known causes. Because of the rice that hasn’t arrived in the warehouse for months or because of that strange “blockade,” which allows you to build luxury hotels, wear brand-name clothes, shoes, watches and handbags, but prevents you from repairing a thermoelectric plant.
If Ignacio Giménez—as well as the other deranged man in olive green with whom he emulates in perversity—knows anything about Cubans (because he is also one, despite his peninsular accent), it is having well identified that which can “mobilize” them and even drive them crazy, making them forget previous lies, even if they are the same ones from yesterday and the day before, repeated. Drive them crazy as a moldable mass to the right point, without leading to rebellion, although it does lead to the disappointment necessary to reinforce apathy in them.
He also knows, as if he had learned it in a Party School or a MININT academy, of the art of distraction and, incidentally, how to play into the hands of a dictatorship, which likes those light comedies and those surreal scripts – which it encourages with all bad intentions -, with which to feed its discourse on “bad”, deceptive, hate-ridden social networks. This is a very ineffective trick when in reality the regime needs much more than crazy people like Ignacio Giménez to disguise the already unstable mountain of lies on which it is based.
