HAVANA, Cuba.- In Cuba, and since 1959, the dissemination of certain photographic images is privileged. I, who was born four years after the great disaster of 1959, have seen thousands of times that photo in which Fidel Castro carries his rifle on his shoulder there in the Sierra Maestra. And another of the most iconic ones also has Fidel in the center at the precise moment in which he jumps from the top of a war tank in Playa Girón. Undoubtedly photography, and some photographers, have been very useful to the “revolution”, to its iconography of war.
The photos of Fidel and Che are almost as famous as that image of Marilyn Monroe in “The temptation lives upstairs”, that photo in which she, standing on a subway vent in the Lexington station, has her skirt lifted . And it is curious that among the most famous photos are those that fixed the image of two worshipers of weapons: Fidel Castro and the Argentine Ernesto Guevara. And those two weren’t just passive worshippers, they were active executors of those lethal weapons, of those reapers of life, and yet they were photographed.
And we already know that Guevara himself pulled the trigger in La Cabaña so that death would come out in bursts, so that the men who did not accompany the Argentine in his ideals would fall to the ground, bloodied and dead. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara cannot be imagined without a rifle on their shoulders, without a pistol at their waists. They adored weapons and used them while they were alive, to play with death, to propitiate that of those who did not commune with them.
In the Cuba of the Castros there is a certain cult of death. Death has been shown in images, and without any modesty, by the communists. Who does not remember the photo of the one who we were made to believe wrote the name of Fidel when he was dying, dying they say, but with excellent calligraphy. Death also exalting Fidel. Fidel and his resurrections. Fidel, Fidel. And today the official Cuban discourse does not stop mentioning the massacre in Texas, it does not stop referring to the dead, to the anguish of their relatives.
The Cuban government talks and talks, forgetting its shots, its “Prepare, aim, shoot”… The Cuban government could today boast that it seized the weapons that were in the hands of many Cubans to whom it did not pay a penny, including a gun to my father. They disarmed the people and equipped the army, the police, and spent large sums of money to get them, with the sole objective of keeping any opposition at bay.
If the communists prohibited the possession of weapons, it was with themselves in mind, with their permanence in power. Those who previously pointed missiles at North American territory, later confiscated small pistols, and they did so with them in mind, in their long and “kind” permanence in power. Fidel Castro showed a “pacifist” discourse waging wars in Africa, in Central America, and even made some attempts in South America.
And yes, Fidel and all those who followed him thought a lot about weapons, about making them disappear from “infidel hands” that would use them to remove him from power, to establish a truly democratic government. Fidel and his people thought about what could go through the heads of dissatisfied Cubans if they had a gun in their hands. Fidel Castro had intelligence, that is undeniable, and he recognized himself, in the silence of the night and in the midst of solitude, as a tyrant. Fidel Castro had to foresee rebellions like those of 11J, and in many circumstances, and with weapons.
Fidel Castro must have foreseen, lying down in his bed, the people in the street willing to do anything to get the freedom that he did not grant them that first of January. Fidel Castro did not want an armed people, he wanted a people subordinated by arms, a people that recognized the force of a shot, the lethality of a shot, and even the greatness of that freedom that he insisted on making us believe that he had given us.
He himself invented slogans such as: “The people united will never be defeated”, let us then imagine that people with weapons in hand and facing all that evil that he represented. Are we different from the rest of the world? Don’t Cubans cause death by stabbing, and by hanging, and punching? Are there not dead young people who were victims of weapons, a gun, a knife or a stick? Stones don’t kill? Aren’t there cops who shoot and kill? Did they perhaps forget that they looted many armories and then killed with those weapons, like the one that years later was seized from my father? Did they forget their bombs and their deaths?
This government is very forgetful, and conveniently ignores its dead, but it is not even capable of showing the evidence of those who die due to the negligence of the government, of those who are buried after being shot by that policeman who broke their chest, nor do they show the one who died in prison due to lack of medical attention, those who were crushed by the weight of a balcony, of an entire house, or by the bullet that came out of a police officer’s gun or the jet of water that sinks a boat loaded with life The communists are as murderous as those who kill in American schools, and even so they play at taking photos in the middle of the landscape of a battle.
OPINION ARTICLE
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