By Alberni Poulot Cumbá on July 5, 2021
A forgetful person is not an absentee of memories, he is a person who is ashamed of what he has lived, someone who renounces his ancestors.
Obama invited us to the concert of forgetfulness in 2016 and the Machiavellian media “over there” never stops insisting on it.
There is no being more vulnerable than the one who does not know his identity and where he came from. He is simply “Nothing” and “Nobody”. In the dimension of the people, that is its self-invisiblization. The Predators of History are moving towards that goal.
In my hands is a book without the fanfare of being a “Best Seller”, written by a little known author in the media, about a period of time that has a meager history of memories and stories.
The Empire’s predators take advantage of the voluntary or Cultural War-induced forgetfulness to distort and misuse it in the ideological trade and historical account.
The title of the book: “Guantanamo Bay” by Rigoberto Cruz Díaz, published in 1977 by Oriente Publishing House and it was honorably mentioned by the prestigious contest of Literature of Casa de las Americas.
The book exposes textually and heartbreakingly, how the North American Intervention Government, under the command of Brigadier General, Leonard Wood, imposed the “Special Regulation for the Regime of Prostitution in Cuba”, it is a collection in addition to the “Military Bando No.1 of 1898”, where the first Yankee measure in Cuba was implemented to impose the Total Naval Blockade and the indiscriminate bombardment against the Island and contains the dehumanized testimonies of victims of prostitution that were collected in the country.
From this humiliating and aberrant regulation I convert them:
Article II authorized, under the totalitarianism of the regulation, the exercise of prostitution in Cuba, instead of eradicating it expanded it and lowered to the condition of semi-slavery (since they received a miserable pay in degrading conditions) the more than 100 thousand Cuban women when the island had a population of a little more than one million people who were forced to practice the dishonorable work.
Article IX, in its paragraph b, reflects how these women had to obediently and meekly allow themselves to be “recognized”, in good Cuban apparel by the assigned physician “in the way that the doctor believes should be practiced”, so it says in the Regulation. And if for any reason they did not want to accept the humiliation, then they would be detained, taken to a police office, fined… and then examined by the doctor anyway.
In this article, which is about prohibitions and obligations, the women are forbidden to greet in public (even if they are in a space outside their “work”), to travel in uncovered carriages through streets and promenades, to walk two together outside the assigned demarcation, to visit theaters of “first order”…, in short, they could not by decree be dignified women.
In medieval Europe and in the first steps of the current North American empire, women thus or declared thus, were marked on a visible part of the body with a letter, with an incandescent iron…, without the inquisitorial fire, those women were marked by the iron of ignominy.
Article X regulated the obligation of these women to live under the opprobrium of a Matron, Mistress or Head of Service, with the onerous prerogative of living outside the brothel, in conditions of isolation and without the right to receive visits from any man, except the Doctor of the service, and we know why, as was pointed out in Article XII.
If their owners “requested” them, they had to abandon the license and become fit for service again. They would never be free from the Regulation!
The end I quote verbatim:
“Our mission has been to build an Anglo-Saxon republic in a Latin country, where approximately 70% of the population is illiterate, in a Latin military colony, a republic exactly traced to our great republic”.
May the Creator continue to save us from such a manifest destiny. I never understood what that sort of normative tagline in the body of the document had to do with it, but in the eyes of the forgetful and amnesiacs, it makes me wonder: will that vision be different from the one they have of us now, will they offer us another destiny in a supposed Cuba without Revolution or Socialism?
As Cuban analyst Reynaldo Taladrid says, “Draw your own conclusions”. In my case, History helped me to draw mine.
Dr. Alberni Poulot Cumbá, is Professor and Chair of History-Marxism-Leninism at the University of Las Tunas.
Source: Red In Defense of Humanity, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English