HAVANA, Cuba. – They want to set a record with the number of “zero deaths” reported after the passage of Hurricane Rafael but at the cost of remaining silent about the criminal abandonment that caused death and destruction in Guantánamo during the passage of the Hurricane Oscar. They brag about a miracle that does not correspond to them – but rather what would make the category 3 not drag its center through Havana, to finish bringing down what today, even without suffering cyclones or bombings, seems like a post-apocalyptic city – but only seeking extinguish with the false feat the scandalous passivity with which they handled the previous situation.
The official media, faithful to their role as spokespersons, played into their hands at that time and today continue in the same line of complicity. They are ceasing to touch on the issue of the deceased – of which the people of San Antonio del Sur themselves suspect that there could be more than the nine reported by the Civil Defense – to emphasize the recent “success” and relegate the news to the “advances of recovery” when what those affected expect, in addition to real help, is to know the names and surnames of those directly responsible for not having been informed or evacuated in time.
They know that they are the same ones who set up emergency phones that no one answers or that are turned off or out of coverage, the same ones that instead of reporting minute by minute about the storm, they fill up with reports on government actions and other political propaganda. And the same ones who visit them feigning concern, and who have promised to “investigate” but only because they were confronted by those who are fed up with justifications and promises that, from previous experiences, in less complex situations, they know will never be fulfilled.
Because in Cuba the cyclone that devastates today not only takes away houses, lives and planted food but also the unfulfilled promises of the previous cyclone, under the pretext of the new “priorities” and under the protection of a press that uses it with total mischief. intention a catastrophe to bury the previous ones that, because they are forgotten, people who never suffer them assume them as resolved, overcome, as a clean slate because what is not spoken or written about, does not exist, never. existed.
That is, silence, one of the strategies that Castroism uses most (even in its updated and at the same time worsened version in these days of “continuity”) when it cannot or does not have the will to solve the problems that it faces. accumulates
What he does not want or cannot face he simply cancels, he buries it and, when it comes to tragedies, then if it is with another similar or superior one – especially one of chance and not of intentionality – it can be said that he sees the heavens open in Both disasters are immediately translated into international aid, a blessing for any bankrupt government.
So, knowing that it still has control of the streets by dint of repression, it is worth it for the regime to raise popular discontent a little, endure a certain degree of repudiation and criticism, because a “poorly managed” disaster immediately translates in Russian credits for the purchase of fuel, in “Mexican royalties”in compassion and financial donations from the left and right. While another subsequent disaster “well handled” (or at least in appearances, that is, the appearances they manufacture with their own press media) not only consolidates them in the role of victims but also allows them to redeem themselves, at least in front of those that easily offer redemption.
Today what happened in Guantánamo begins the burial process. Much faster when Rafael arrived a few days later and, after a few hours, the pair of earthquakes of alarming intensitywith its more than 300 replicas.
So many disasters attract the attention of the press, but more of the people who, plunged into misery, have been convinced for a long time that the Island is going through a long streak of bad luck, who knows for what punishment or curse, for what action. of the past that has condemned her to pilgrimage from calamity to suffering, without having memory of what happened.
I think that after so many disastrous coincidences, people understand that the time has come to give the true name (with surnames and positions) to bad luck, and that they are no longer satisfied with calling Oscar or Rafael a hurricane much worse than any other. past or to come. A storm that although some of us call it “Hambrosio” (with an H, as some in Cuba have named it in reference to perpetual hunger) has actually left more horrible things among us.
