Frightened as they are, the Castros become more furious and aggressive. Like cornered rats, they bite anything that comes close to their environment and they perceive as a threat.
HAVANA.- The dreams of seeing Cuba free, shared by Cubans who live on both sides of the Florida Strait and in other parts of the world, are enormous and legitimate. However, these days some of us have questioned whether the liberation of the country could be achieved with the landing of a group of men ten times smaller than the expeditionaries of the Granma yacht.
In Cuba there is a dictatorship that has been massacring civilians at sea since long before the massacre of the Canímar riverin 1980, and the sinking of the tug March 13in 1994. Given this history, if the Castros were capable of murdering dozens of people—including children—whose only “crime” was fleeing communism, it is worth asking what fate would await those who, armed, as the Cuban Ministry of the Interior affirms, tried to “violate” the 12-mile nautical limit.
It should not be forgotten that the dictatorship does not distinguish whether they are fishermen, flotillas of solidarity or simple seagulls flying over the sea: in all cases it shoots. Therefore, in light of the regime’s horrifying antecedents, it is inconceivable – if the poorly told official version is to be believed – that ten men, a kind of modern argonauts, have come to Cuba in search of the golden fleece of freedom, also facing a storm of such intensity that not even Sinbad, Popeye or Erik the Red would have dared to go to sea.
If someone does not consider “the torment of the century” for the Castro dictatorship Donald Trump’s executive order that qualifies Cuba as “an extraordinary and unusual threat to the national security of the United States,” along with the imposition of an energy blockade and the presence of American warships in the Caribbean, then it does not know the true force of a gale.
The Castros are in panic, but they have not given up. The show of force against a boat—which ended with the death of four people—reveals that the dictatorship, willing to risk everything for everything, still has hidden cards, as it has done so many times when it has found itself cornered.
Frightened as they are, the Castros become more furious and aggressive. Like cornered rats, they bite anything that comes close to their environment and they perceive as a threat. Everything seems dangerous to them, and to confront it they activate every last repressive spring. They are proving it daily.
