Rosa Miriam Elizalde: The parallel reality of Cuba in Paris

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iserable society that imposes reprehensible practices of inquisition and falsehood. Miserable are those who deny Cuba the joy of its nine Olympic medals, the same number won by Denmark, a country without the US blockade and without the press and the gossipmongers on the networks reproaching its performance in Paris.

The advertising strategy to turn each Cuban success into a failure has an interesting peculiarity: it operates in continuous bursts, for brief and intense periods in which a thematic axis is established. From the supposed arrival in Caracas of 32 flights from Havana to intervene in the Venezuelan elections, the non-existent Chinese military bases in Cuban territory, the presence of Russian submarines with nuclear weapons in Havana Bay that did not take place in reality, the alleged failure of Cuba in the Paris Olympics, everything is aimed at the production of Agenda.

The dizzying pace with which advertising ideas follow one another suggests that none of them achieves a minimum of power in public opinion: their objective is not essentially to modify opinions, but rather the installation of a parallel reality, the stirring up of prejudices, the persistence of hatred as the exclusive source of legitimacy for a government that is leading the country through its worst economic crisis and under permanent siege.

The latest trend in this fashion, however, seems to be crossing a barrier and beginning the transition to a new period, flatly denying reality, ignoring the evidence of the facts that have been corroborated by millions of spectators attending the Olympic Games. Cuba was not only the Latin American country with the greatest number of medals won, surpassed only by Brazil, but the Cuban player who for the first time in history has won five consecutive Olympic medals in the same discipline is Mijaín López.

Neither Bolt nor Phelps nor Lewis nor other legends of the sport achieved what Mijaín did. He made his debut in Athens 2004 and from Beijing 2008 to Paris 2024 he took home the gold in Greco-Roman wrestling, a discipline that was practiced in the classical world before the birth of Jesus Christ and in which since the establishment of the Olympic Games no other gladiator has held the scepter for so many years. Until Mijaín appeared, a compendium of culture and the comings and goings of national history: a black man with a Russian name, known throughout Cuba as the Horseshoe Giantbecause he is 1.93 metres tall, weighs 130 kilograms and was born in a small town of that name with barely 10 thousand inhabitants, which did not exist on the map until American settlers discovered its fertile lands and settled there at the beginning of the 20th century. His family is descended from Africans who worked all their lives for the rich whites of that area until they became literate with the 1959 revolution and, thanks to it and to the plans to extend sport to every town in the country, while his father, Bartolo, worked the land, Mijaín and his two brothers won medals in national and international boxing and Greco-Roman wrestling championships.

And this Cuban athlete was the one selected to represent the athletes of the Americas in Paris at the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games.

But with this attitude of contempt for others, of worship of violence that takes pleasure in the suffering of others, not a few media and agencies, in addition to the cyberspace pack, are depriving Mijaín and the other Cuban Olympic athletes of the medal. With indignation we read everywhere the expected failure, Worst Olympics for Cuba, slope, sports crisis, shipwreck and other niceties, and as a footnote, insignificant, the results that most nations on this planet would have liked to have.

The French philosopher and urban planner Paulo Virilio anticipated in the book Cyberworld, the politics of the worst (1997), a long interview with his compatriot Philippe Petit, who The day will come when virtual reality will defeat the real world… The body itself will cease to exist in favour of the spectral body, and the world itself in favour of a virtual world.For saying these things, which are our daily bread, Virilio was accused 30 years ago of being apocalyptic.