OPINION | Lie and blood in Cuba

Editor’s note: Camilo Egaña is the driver of Camilo. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

(CNN Spanish) – Who takes the trouble, and I mean it literally, to read the first page of Thursday’s edition July 15, 2021 from the newspaper Granma, the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba, the only party allowed on the island, will run into the following:

Miguel Díaz-Canel, the president imposed by Raúl Castro, calls for hatred not to appropriate the Cuban soul. Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz assures that the island’s government is concerned and busy in all the country’s affairs. Vice Prime Minister Alejandro Gil Fernández announces two new measures to boost the socialist state enterprise. And on the inside pages, but with a call on the main page of the newspaper, the phrase of a popular music singer is quoted who says: ” The revolution is love. There is no reason to attack him. “

Whoever takes the trouble, and I mean it literally, of watching the news of Cuban Television, the only one allowed on the island, will not be able to see images like those of one of the videos recorded, apparently this Tuesday. It shows how a group of police officers arrive at a house and enter through the back door to take away an alleged opposition protester in the city of Cárdenas, Matanzas province, east of Havana.

A woman, Marbely Vásquez, yells at the police that her children are with her. Through a window you can see a group of uniformed men.

In the background you can hear the noise of knocking against a door, as if they were trying to knock it down. Moments later, the agents enter with a dog through a back door and she says between sobs: “My children, why are you doing that?”

At another time, Marbely Vásquez, the wife of Daniel Cárdenas Díaz, who spoke with The Miami HeraldSays: “My husband was shot in here. They got in here, they shot him down, after having him on the floor, full of shots. Look, full of blood, they hit him with pineapples (blows), they rode him like a pig inside a truck.

CNN has not identified who or how edited the video. CNN has tried unsuccessfully since Wednesday to contact Marbely Vásquez.

We have also sought a reaction from the Cuban authorities, but we have not yet received a response.

For the Cuban government press, the island is today “the best of all possible worlds.”

President Miguel Díaz-Canel tends to become poetic – or at least he has tried the odd juggling of more or less poetic encouragement – in his messages on social networks … but I doubt that he has ever read Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti , to Antonio Machado, all poets who suffered and described the Spanish civil war, which is the war between brothers that is closest to us Latin Americans.

When Diaz-Canel announced in the last hours that “the combat order has been given,” he opened wide and perhaps without even suspecting it, a hatch that is difficult to close again.
The government thus gave the green light to all possible excesses, to the fierce, unthinkable, uncritical, infinite repression against the unarmed protesters.

The condemnation of that decision has been practically universal. But from the hard core of the Cuban government there has not been a single self-criticism, not even the hint of doubt.

If there is something revolutionary, it is doubt, because doubt no matter how small the perennial marble of certainty may be pierced: motionless by nature.

If there is a war in which it is almost impossible to achieve true peace, it is the war between brothers.

I reiterate that for the Cuban government press, the island is today “the best of all possible worlds.”

The Cuban regime reminds me of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 17th-century German philosopher and theologian, who — without blushing — argued that since God is good, the universe that God chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds.

Then Voltaire — blessed Voltaire — as a defender of the Enlightenment, made fun of all that and parodied that phrase in the mouth of one of his best literary characters.

Well, nothing, four centuries later, the Cuban regime rides on the back of Marx and Leibniz: a philosopher from the seventeenth century and another from the nineteenth. Perhaps when that regime reaches the 21st century, there will be changes on the island.

Seeing is believing, as St. Augustine asked.