By Julián Gutiérrez Alonso on October 4, 2022
photo: Jose Manuel Correa
Since the beginning of the Revolution, as early as 1960, when Lester Mallory, in a report to President Eisenhower, told him, among other things, that the only thing that was going to bring down Fidel was the “war of despair”.
I believe that at that time it was very difficult to convince the Cuban people that the Revolution was going to bring them hardship, hunger and shortages that would lead them to despair. At that time, spending a week without electricity was not a problem for many Cubans who did not know electricity before the Revolution; much less water services and other things. That is why they had to try other ways such as invasions, sabotage, assassination attempts and others.
Today the situation has changed and when we spent three days without electricity and water, the “war of despair” is more useful for those who want us to return to the previous system and provoke those who did not live through that era and those who have forgotten it.
Our leaders say that we must respect the right to protest peacefully and I agree. But when I see people who, induced from abroad, carry out acts that damage the rights of all to free transit, to the tranquility of the citizens, to a country without violence, without tortured or disappeared people, carrying out what those who wish to take us back to capitalism have designed for this moment, taking advantage of what Mallory described, I ask myself: Is it valid to protest so that we return to illiteracy, to the privatization that makes electricity and water unaffordable in many places, or to lose all the rights to the inviolability of the human person that the Revolution has given us? I do not believe that the right to go against those other rights that we have conquered is above the others.
What can we say? The non-conformists do deserve to be heard and we all deserve information, but not the right to violence against the rights of all. Violence against all is closing a road, setting fire to objects to obstruct them or damaging a garbage container, just to cite a few examples of what I have seen these days. I believe that we cannot rely only on TV, radio, newspapers or digital networks. In times like the ones we are living today, and other similar ones, many people do not have access to any of these channels. Even in normal times, many of these nonconformists do not use these media and a not negligible number when more use the networks in which the haters predominate despite the struggle that many develop giving love in them.
I believe that we must create innovative mechanisms that allow us to reach the broad majorities with truthful information about our social process and encourage them to participate in it. Not political “techies” without informative content. The truth of our system will always convince and I am sure that if we achieve it we will defeat the “war of despair” that they want us to make.
We must not forget what Fidel warned us from the steps of the University of Havana on November 5th, that only we could destroy the Revolution.
Let us fight for the Revolution forever, which is the only one that will give us the rights that this sacrificed people deserve, which is to fight with our all and for the good of all, expanding rights as we have just done with the new Family Code.
Source: La Pupila Insomne, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US