By Iroel Sanchez on October 18, 2022
“I am a man full of fear, I cannot sleep without chemical help, I am alone and I have lost confidence in everyone who walks the earth. I am always wary of being sold or of being approached and hurt”. This is what the writer Roberto Saviano said about his life after challenging the Neapolitan Mafia with his book Gomorrah. Neither commercial success, nor living under escort, nor the awards received have allowed him to escape fear. “The money is for lawyers, because I am in lawsuits with Salvini and Meloni,” says the Italian writer, who denounces the use of the local press to create a rarefied climate against him.
Saviano’s book is a journalistic investigation, but there are many movies, series and fiction books about the Mafia, from classics like The Godfather and The Sopranos, to those that give you the impression of having seen or read them before because they repeat well-worn paths with little psychological complexity and poor plot. In the best and the worst, there are always constants that characterize the genre: blackmail as a method of social control, making the fear of challenging the bosses the basis for the functioning of a neighborhood, a city, a territory or a business.
So this is how the links between economics, politics, communication, justice and physical violence are strangling the reach of those who might constitute dissident voices in a community. What is unusual is that this fear is proclaimed to the four winds and with it a presidential position of the most powerful country in the world is justified, as the U.S. Senator for Florida, Marco Rubio, has just done with President Joe Biden.
Rubio, in an electoral act with a view to the congressional elections coming next November 8, held at the “American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Miami”, has just affirmed that the only reason why the Biden administration has not returned to Obama’s policies towards Cuba is because “it is afraid of the Cuban exiles in Florida”. Receiving there the support of organizations historically linked to terrorism and political violence such as Brigade 2506, protagonist of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and people like Olando Gutierrez Boronat who repeatedly calls for US military intervention in Cuba and with notorious links to the Osama Bin Laden of the Western Hemisphere: Luis Posada Carriles, who died in his Miami bed without being bothered by US authorities for his crimes, including the mid-air bombing of a passenger plane with 73 people on board.
Several days have passed since Rubio’s offensive statements and neither from the White House nor from the Democratic Party, there has been the slightest response, confirming the old saying that he who is silent gives in. Until now, 63 years of fear, with not a few fatalities, job cancellations and threats of all kinds, have turned Miami politicians and the media into a practically unanimous chorus with respect to Cuba, but never before has there been such an explicit statement made which, however, was not picked up by a single one of the representatives of the press media present at the event in support of Rubio, but which was recorded in the video recording of the same disseminated through the Internet, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRaSMib6shc. The classic case of the dog that bites the man was not news this time.
The so-called Cuban American mafia has a long list of terrorist actions in the United States, the most recent manifestation of which was an attack with an assault rifle shot at the Cuban embassy in Washington in 2020, including the assassination of a Cuban diplomat accredited to the UN and of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, plus a not small list of people living in Miami, New Jersey and Puerto Rico who have been victims of armed violence for being prone to a change in relations with Havana.
But the intervention of this extremist sector, fabricated and financed by the U.S. government itself, is like a Frankenstein that always turns against its creators. To cite just a few examples: From the assassination of the brothers John and Robert Kennendy, the Watergate scandal that cost Nixon his presidency, the Mariel immigration crisis that took it away from Carter, the Iran Contra scandal that discredited Bush Sr., the migrant crisis of the rafters and the case of the child Elian that sent Clinton running, to the “sonic attacks” on US diplomats in Havana, now denied by the CIA, but that have made the federal government spend hundreds of millions in investigations and compensations. Those “attacks” never proven, served the Trump administration to please politicians like Marco Rubio and to reverse the thaw initiated by Obama in relations with Cuba that, as the senator for Florida rightly says, President Biden has not resumed, by maintaining to the letter Trump’s policies towards the Island.
It is known that the Cuban-American mafia control over the vote in the state of Florida gave the “tight” victory to Bush Jr. over Al Gore in the presidential elections of 2000 and that the head of the Democratic electoral campaign on that occasion, Ron Klain, current chief of staff of Biden, was traumatized forever, to the extent that it is said in Washington that Mr. Klain does not want to hear anything about even the slightest contact with Cuba and something similar to what happens to Roberto Saviano, but without the courage to recognize it, happens to him. So it seems that it is not fear but terror that exists in Biden’s team towards what Rubio calls “Cuban exile” and it is nothing more than the mafia machinery that controls the political expression in South Florida.
On February 23, 2019, in the midst of a binge of euphoria, and perhaps something more, that ended in resounding failure, at the head of an attempt to invade Venezuela through the border bridge of Cucuta from Colombian territory, and in the company of the now discredited Ivan Duque and Sebastian Pinera, Marco Rubio, in the best style of Al Capone, tweeted a threatening message to Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, “See you soon,” he wrote (see https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1099430343319449600).
In Cuba nobody paid attention to him, three and a half years have passed and Gustavo Petro resumed relations between Colombia and Venezuela, reopening the Cúcuta bridge, and now the New York Times says that Washington should recognize Nicolás Maduro, but it seems that in the White House they are afraid of the Godfather of Miami.
Source: La Pupilia Insomne