PUERTO PADRE, Cuba.- Mike Hammer, acting chargé d’affaires at the United States Embassy in Cuba, visited the Puerto Padre municipality this week, fulfilling the representation of his high investiture, which, according to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, provides for the promotion of friendly relations between nations.
Even so, and with all that judgment of international law brought to diplomacy universally accepted in civilized countries, when the head of the American legation in Havana – already well known to Cubans for interacting equally with archbishops and with very humble citizens regardless of whether they are believers or atheists – arrived in the eastern province of Las Tunas, he was harassed like never before by repeated “acts of repudiation”, organized as he passed through several cities in the central region of the country by the political police of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT), with the participation of officials of the Communist Party or simple followers and vigilante vigilantes of the totalitarian regime, masquerading as “the people.”
But, in Puerto Padre, this panorama of disgrace and very sad conditions would reach its lowest point on the scale of moral values and human rights, when in a country that calls itself “socialist”, in “revolution”, for the “humble” and “for the humble”, it was precisely State Security police who attacked humble people, from a very humble neighborhood, who according to their own voice transmitted by a third party and under unique conditions, news that has turned around to the world, they were torn from their home, detained by the police for the mere fact of pretending to receive at their home and speak publicly, with the ambassador of the United States, a country that for more than 60 years has given shelter to hundreds of thousands of Cubans, among them, residents of Puerto Padre, which some call “Little Miami.”
In Puerto Padre Mike Hammer witnessed an event that proves in an elliptical way – understood as a spiral, yes, as a spring that contains, but at the same time pushes and kills – of the concept of island-prison or archipelago-prison with which I have been defining Cuba for a long time under the Castro-communist monarchy.
The fact that in Cuba the prison is made up of the entire society and not just the penitentiary establishments, the head of the US diplomatic mission verified for himself in Puerto Padre, and he demonstrated it in the presence of a witness, a woman, family member or neighbor who heard the testimony of the complaining child, which gives legal force to the words of the minor when he acted as SOS of the inhabitants of the house where Hammer arrived, extracted to prevent the real and not rhetorical “town to town” visit of the head of the United States Embassy in Havana.
“They told me to tell them that they were detained,” said the boy, conveying the message of the family, captivated by inviting the American diplomat to their home.
I don’t know if, experienced as he is in international relations, Mike Hammer has heard words in other parts of the world like this boy in Puerto Padre said to him: “They told me to tell them that they were detained.”
Suffering from the pain he must have felt, I understand the Ambassador when he asked the boy his name and what he wanted to be when he grew up, after hearing loud and clear, brave, the boy’s voice like a radio operator soldier in the hubbub of combat, transmitting coordinates to aim the artillery, because that and no other, should have been the message of Hammer’s police-arrested hosts, who in a state of need, legally speaking, should have found no other means of communication than the voice of a child.
Yes. Of course! Cuba is an island-prison, or even worse, it is an archipelago-prison because it is an infinite sea, yes, an ocean in which no matter how much you come and go, you will not find a drop of fresh water, that is, a drop of freedom. And if you have seen that embarrassing lack throughout Cuba, personally, and in the voice of a child, it was suffered by Mike Hammer in Puerto Padre.
