Havana Cuba. — The new working week began for me with good news: through WhatsApp, which is proclaimed to be encrypted and secure, I received a video made by compatriots who reside on our Island. As we live in the Cuba of the communications monopoly ( ETECSA) and we suffered from their lousy service, I had to wait too many seconds to start seeing it.
But the little wait was worth it. In just five minutes, the filmmakers, in the voices of numerous compatriots who also struggle to live in this “tropical paradise of the proletariat”, convey to us a simple and accurate idea: that of do not go to the polling stations the coming 26 of the current, the day indicated by the regime to perpetrate its supposed electoral exercise, manipulative and liar.
As is well known, on that day every Cuban residing in the Homeland —not the millions of exiles— will have the possibility of going or not voting. And this in a process in which it is known in advance that, thanks to the deceitful methods established by Castroism, each of the candidates for the 470 seats provided for in the new National Assembly of People’s Power will “succeed.”
The phrase repeated by each of the participants in the concise video is simple: “I abstain.” The dissemination of the short film seemed very good to me and I consider it an excellent contribution to that civic position that —I am convinced— is the correct one in the face of the imminent staging of the criollo communists. For this reason, I hastened to forward it to my contacts along with a brief congratulatory note to the filmmakers and participants.
There are various reasons that each of the appearing parties uses to justify the withdrawal of the coming 26, but all are valid and acceptable. Some focus on the clamorous material deficiencies —lack of food and medical assistance, endless queues, etc.—; others emphasize more suprastructural phenomena, such as the prisoners of conscience, the more than 500 unrecognized churches, or the constitutional precepts violated by the very regime that dictated them.
But all these cartoons, as a whole, support the central thesis: that of not going to put your face in an exercise that has been designed by the communists so that, in what is supposed to be “the supreme organ of the state power” of this Greater Antilles, a few hundred other no less communist citizens present themselves as supposed representatives of the generality of the citizenry (including the clear majority who are fed up with the imposed system).
It is not that, in the short documentary, everything is unobjectionable. To begin with, at least I fail to understand the motto that is repeated over and over again: “A sure action is better than an uncertain hope.” The first thing to point out in this context is that, strictly speaking, what is being advocated is an omission and not an action.
And what would be the “hope”! The siren songs of communist propaganda, which proclaims that “better is possible”! It is an affirmation that is not certain, but it is the height of impudence that the same ones that have put us in the current mess suggest that the very system enthroned by them will lead us to a better place!
On a personal level, I would have preferred that, instead of “I abstain”, a more popular slogan such as “I do not vote” or, perhaps better, “I am not going to vote” had been used. We already know that the founder of the dynasty, in a demagogic pose to ingratiate himself with his vassals, declared the Cuban “the most cultured people in the world.” But the reality is far from there. Unfortunately, there will be no shortage of our compatriots who do not understand what “abstain” means.
Another issue that, I think, would have been convenient to point out is that in Castro’s Cuba, contrary to what was established by the Constitution democratic 1940, it is not mandatory to vote. In view of the terror instilled by the dictatorial regime in its subjects for more than 64 years, it would be convenient to make this aspect explicit. In this way, frightened ordinary Cubans will not fear that, by staying in their homes on March 26, they may be breaking the law.
For certain, I do not dare to affirm that those aspects that I have pointed out really constitute polka dots of this initiative that has just been disclosed. I just have some doubts about it. I do not exclude that, in reality, the error is mine, and not that of the filmmakers and participants in the video.
But above the objections that anyone can make to this realization, there is something undeniable: in the midst of the stagnation, hopelessness and prostration in which Cubans have been left due to the calamitous situation prevailing, this civic call ignites a little flame of hope for this town that right now seems to believe that it has been abandoned even by God.
OPINION ARTICLE
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