PUERTO PADRE, Cuba – “Fifth column” is an expression to keep in mind today in Cuba, not only because of its connotations for and against freedom, but also because we Cubans live in a panorama of concrete danger, due to the suppression of individual freedoms of peoplein the face of a possible confrontation like the one that occurred in Venezuela on January 3.
An event like the one that recently occurred in Caracas could cause the Castro-communist regime to proceed peremptorily as it did in April 1961, when the landing of Brigade 2506 at the Bay of Pigs, that is, the mass arrest and confinement of those already considered potential “C/R” (counterrevolutionary), which would occur even without the usual rigged judicial processes, but only by making criteria prevail. politicians, police and socio-politicians on people and who are not only openly oppositional journalists and activists, but also all those who, denounced by their neighbors, for their political, religious, economic opinions or way of life, the political police consider them “fifth column”, meaning dangerous enemies at large in a state of war.
The term “fifth column” comes to us from the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) and is attributed to the general director of Security and later head of the IV rebellious Division, the general of Cuban origin Emilio Mola Vidal, born in Placetas, son of a Cuban woman married to a Spanish soldier stationed in Cuba, Mola was the nephew of the general of the Liberation Army Leoncio Vidal. And, the origin of the word “fifth column” would take place when in a message broadcast on the radio, Mola Vidal said that in addition to the four columns that under his command were heading to the Spanish capital, there was already a fifth column of sympathizers of the coup d’état in Madrid, working clandestinely to expedite the victory.
It is understood then that according to criteria of State Security and of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), for example, I am a “fifth columnist”, an “enemy of the people”, an “unloved”, and that is what the then first secretary of the PCC in Puerto Padre, Roy Molina Campos (who now lives in the United States), would say, so it is not strange that for years, I have been watched, harassed and tortured by the political police using all possible methods and means, (even through the music used as a spiteful noise that is harmful to health, amplified by a “Cuban American” to unbearable levels with the complicity of the prosecutor’s office in Puerto Padre and the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic) for writing books and journalistic articles that the totalitarian regime labels as “counterrevolutionary.”
But, yes, long before hearing the noise of the American planes in the Cuban sky, even without bombings, in Cuba and in the world no one is surprised because the political police knocks on the door and takes them to a sports stadium or the barracks of an idle sugar mill, and there they lock them up, those who, unlike me and so many others who at the risk of their lives exercise their civil rights, from one end to the other in this archipelago-prison, well, those who have not written books or journalistic articles nor have they raised their voices in political activism or public demonstrations against the totalitarian regime, They are also locked up because among neighbors or among groups of friends or unions infiltrated by snitches, they have shown their discontent that is potentially dangerous enough to be branded as “fifth columnists.”
The free world must all have its eyes fixed on Cuba, because from harassment, (regardless of whether the victims are diplomats, like Mike Hammer), white torture and segregation, the regime moves on to arrests and “judicial” processes like those that are happening these days against individual people, for exercising their rights of free expression on social networks, and, from that stage, it moves on to mass repression, to stadiums where instead of spectators there are hundreds, thousands of people locked up, prisoners, due to a certain or uncertain danger, but of potential risk for the dictatorship: the fifth column.
