HAVANA, Cuba. – This Wednesday, August 21, several U.S. senators and congressmen They sent a letter Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for allowing entry into the United States of Manuel Menéndez Castellanos, a former senior official of the Cuban Communist Party, former deputy to the National Assembly of People’s Power, and former member of the “coordination and support team for Fidel Castro,” who arrived at Miami International Airport just a week ago under the Family Reunification Program.
The arrival of the former Castro leader fell like a bucket of cold water on the community of Cuban exiles who have seen the arrival in droves, in recent years, of everything from small-time informants and ideological commissioners who ruined the lives of their fellow countrymen, to counterintelligence agents and prosecutors who sent innocent people to prison “because they were ordered to do so from above,” violating not only the ethical code of their profession, but also basic principles of humanity.
Now they also sneak through the city that the first exiles built. Fidel Castroto high-ranking repressors who for decades allowed, authorized, executed, applauded and unanimously approved oppression in all its forms and the dispossession of the rights of the Cuban people.
Manuel Menéndez Castellanos arrived in the United States despite the fact that there are immigration laws that tacitly prohibit it. If one takes into account that the regime in Havana is becoming more vile and repressive towards the Cuban people every day, and more complacent and unconditional towards regimes that seek the destruction of the United States, it is inevitable to ask why there is an escape route for the communist henchmen who encouraged and personally undertook the material and cultural destruction of Cuba, in addition to maintaining for decades, without respite, an aggressive and denigrating discourse towards the northern country.
If there was one thing left for the Cuban exiles and the opposition that from within the Island tries to continue making visible the violation of civil rights by the regime of Miguel Diaz-CanelIt is precisely that the perpetrators of so much misfortune enter the country of freedom like Peter, telling the press, with their very hard face – in the case of Menéndez Castellanos – that they are going “home”. Their home, on Yankee soil, the enemy country that all of them, in their years of physical and political strength, said they felt disgust for.
Now, as helpless old men, their families are calling on them to take care of them with the benefits of a well-equipped health system. They are calling on them to save them from the atrocious death that awaited them in this country. The former acolytes of Fidel Castro consumed all the lives they wanted, they drained them, they ruined them, and today they are leaving without paying for their many sins, another privilege that they are granted at the end of their miserable existences. And it must be said, like it or not, that there has been much less fuss about the arrival of Miami of that very big fish that for small characters appeared in lands of freedom that never had a voice or vote in the decisions taken by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.
Menéndez Castellanos did have a say, but he is there, in the heart of the Cuban exile community, breathing freely, eating well, resting and enjoying his retirement far from the misery that he himself helped spread, from the garbage dumps, the blackouts, the breakdowns in Cuenca Sur, the rationing, the demagogy and so many evils created by him and his cronies. After communism vacillated in Cuba, it will also vacillate in Miami, which is definitely no longer what it was.
Maybe those who say that the United States is not the country it used to be are right. Or maybe it is just the good luck that, unfortunately, the worst sons of bitches have. There are many Cuban families who have been (des)perating for years for the Reunification Program, where their cases remain frozen. However, the henchmen get the way out and leave in a hurry, at the worst moment in the history of Cuba in times of peace.
It would be a lie to say that life here remains the same. It is worse, but while everything is disintegrating, the regime that Menéndez Castellanos defended continues to decide which Cubans have the right to leave and enter their country. It continues to regulate, prohibit and take away all rights from political prisoners, even the right to “family reunification” on a Sunday, Mother’s Day, as they did to the young man. Wilber Aguilar —prisoner of 11J— last May.
This is how the “dispute” goes, with the Cuban communists going to live in the empire and a prosecutor who now, on American soil, She says she is sorryclaiming that if he returns his life is in danger. It is not worth it from there. The lives destroyed by unjust and prolonged imprisonment are irreparable. The dead, exiled, humiliated and lost thanks to individuals like Menéndez Castellanos continue to wait for justice. Disgusting people. Hypocrites. The dignified and coherent thing would be to return them to Cuba, to share the destiny of its Revolution.
