Cuba: Luces y Sombras 6

En este capítulo contínuo analizando el tema de la crisis Cubana, sus orígenes, transcendencia y consecuencias.

Episode Transcript

(00:03):
They are good hours to everyone andeveryone again with you looked to keep talking

(00:34):
about the theme with which we beginthis season of my podcast. Eight who
don' t know anything. Wewill continue to talk about the issue of
Cuba in order to clarify some ofour own views, some real facts that

(00:55):
have occurred and some subjective facts thathave also had real consequences. In the
other podcast we were talking about themistakes made by the revolution, by the
division of the revolution over the years, apart from the concrete and real problems

(01:15):
caused by the blockade and the economicand political war and the economic and all
kinds of siege that the United Stateshas exercised over more than sixty years against
me. First of all, Iam going to talk about what, in

(01:37):
my view, has also caused greatdamage to the Cuban economy, its society
and its development as a country partof the international concert. First of all,

(01:57):
the Cuban revolution, of course,which was a fact without going,
despite the fact that absurd things arespoken and said that distort the realities of
what was happening in Cuba in theyears of U S domination, such as

(02:21):
Neucolonia, which was what it waswhen the triumph was taken from the Cuban
mambis, from the Cuban rebels whofought against Spain. That is also another
subject that I would like to addresslater, the issue of Cuba' s
independence from Spain. How did ithappen and what interest were involved in it?
Okay. The point is that thereare people who say no that Cuba,

(02:47):
that everything was a marvel that inthe fifty- nine, that Cuba
was the most wonderful thing that thereis in the first, the first Latin
American economy, paint it as thedubai of Latin America in those years.
And that' s a historical manipulationand it has nothing to do with reality.

(03:12):
I say this from my knowledge andsince I was a boy, a
young man, a child, Iheard many stories of the people who lived
at that time. I was luckyenough to talk to many who were even
braziers from other islands, who cameto Cuba to cut canes and who came

(03:36):
to Cuba to collect coffee and dowork, especially in the agricultural sector,
which was the predominant sector in Cuba. At that time and they always tell
me a story of misery and vicissitudes. Also my grandfather, my maternal grandfather,

(03:58):
told me about their vicissitudes, asa family of poor peasants who had
to watch their children die for nothaving money to admit them to a hospital
that barely cost the ridiculous sum offive pesos. There are my uncles,
my aunts who told me that andthe neighbors who told it to me,
and I listened interested in those stories. None of them were either militant or

(04:26):
had risen up in the mountains tofight that injustice, where a small group
of Cubans concentrated a huge part ofthe wealth, but especially where the country
was subordinated to the dictates of theUnited States Government. In Cuba there was

(04:50):
always a pro- consul, whowas the ambassador of the United States,
who determined what the economies or thepolitics of Cuba were doing or not doing.
Cuba was a captive state, astate prisoner of the saints of the
United States Government. That' swhat I told them on another podcast.

(05:14):
Cuba has always been a possession desiredby the United States governments since its inception.
And that cannot be ignored and couldnot be forgotten. That hasn'
t changed. That is the sameand the course of history has proved it.
This whole feruz war of the UnitedStates for subverting order in Cuba has

(05:38):
nothing to do with democracy, norhas it anything to do with resources,
with defending human rights, with nofreedoms, or anything like that. That
' s the speech for idiots forstupid people, who don' t study,
who don' t learn. Thoseare those who say that in Cuba,
that their freedom is what they seein Cuba because there is no freedom

(06:00):
of expression, because there is nodemocracy, etcetera, etcetera. That is,
I repeat, the speech for stupidand mediocre people. People who study
history, who like to know,who investigate, must first recognize that the
United States has never defended democracy inany part of the known world since it

(06:21):
emerged as an independent state, asan independent nation that the United States formed.
The United States defends it its interestsand its expansionist cravings point. And
if for that you have to manageto manipulate my Twitter and diverse, kill

(06:47):
destroy a whole country, because itdoes. There' s no looking like
that It' s not like Isay it. It' s in history,
that story that people don' twant to learn either, that story
that they are very little interested inbecause they haven' t, but that
very well that choirs do when theylisten to a speech as it is.

(07:11):
The Cuban Government must be bombed becauseit did not respect human rights. The
Government of Cuba must change because thereis no democracy and all that stupidity with
which they feed people who have noteven two fingers in front and cannot analyze
reality. That' s a truth, like a temple. So, what

(07:32):
are the mistakes that I see ofCuba, of the Government of Cuba,
of its social project over the years. And for me, the first is
that those young people who made therevolution, like all progressive revolutionary youth in

(07:56):
all ages, the youth the enginethey need and the course of countries,
the economy, society to succeed indefeating a regime like that which had as
its ally to the United States,such as that of fulgencio batista, which
was a critipon of coups d'état and rigged elections of any kind.

(08:22):
Those young people who did not havemuch experience fell into the trap of illusions
and achieved many things, because thesuccess of the Cuban Revolution was not a
minor success or something irrelevant. Itwas a tremendous thing, because, for

(08:43):
the first time in history, agroup of people who were not associated with
an army, that is, didnot have the army as backing, as
had always happened, managed to takepower, that is, from the people,
managed to organize and defeat a tyrannysuch as that of the Batist fulgent,

(09:05):
which was supported by the power groupsof the United States and by the
great Cuban bourgeoisie. That' sthe specific part. But then they made
many mistakes, made many mistakes thatthey didn' t know how to solve
in time and made decisions that weremostly ideological policies, which gave rise to

(09:33):
tremendous problems and tremendous economic catastrophes.It was also a problem and I point
out as something very serious, theoffensive against the revolutionary offensives of the years
of the year nineteen hundred and sixty- eight, where, by the measure

(09:54):
that was taken to confiscate and nationalizeeven the smallest businesses. It ended up
destroying the economic fabric that supported Cuba' s domestic economy. They destroyed all
small businesses and goiters, small shops, small wineries, as they were told
in Cuba, businesses of any kind. I remember my grandfather making me a

(10:22):
story. My Spanish grandfather, whoraised from scratch a very big business,
from being a poor peasant in Galicia, became a small haburger in Cuba,
but he did it with his effort, he did it working him and his

(10:46):
family and my grandmother also confiscated everything. And the worst thing is that they
never paid him or compensated him forthose complications of his life- long work
and left my grandfather with nothing andhis family designated from one day to another
memory told them that my grandfather wasborn into the story of when small business

(11:09):
interventions were made, how there wasin a Liranese who had been very revolutionary
at the stage of the struggle inthe Sierra, that he had worked to
support the revolution and that what hehad was a small business of grinding me
and making pasta or peanut cream.And that man was complicated by everything they

(11:35):
had in the yard of his house. They confiscated it, including the grinders
to grind me there to grind peanutsand he said help, revolution revolutionized everything
to Macanilla. They took off andsaid it to him. I used to

(11:56):
say it funny. But then youanalyze it over the years, you realize
what pain that person would feel,you had your little business, and it
was destroyed by misperceptions or mistaken projectionsbased only on ideology and politics. When

(12:20):
it is involved, the economy issubordinated to politics. Mistakes come like that,
and I think that, even thoughit was argued that it was that
whore it was because the small ownerswere the ones who financed the counterrevolution,
because they were the ones who hadthe most money, etcetera. By taking

(12:46):
the bottom of the funding source,they were going to eliminate, at least
to control the counter- revolution thatexisted of the people who disagreed over the
first laws that were issued, bythe revolution, such as agrarian reform,
urban reform, etc, that depriveda thousand people of property and that,

(13:07):
on many occasions, despite being veryhuman and despite being just to some extent,
created chaos and created many problems,even problems that transcend time. Not
so long ago, I still metpeople who confiscated their homes in Havana because

(13:33):
they were not even in Cuba witha doso, but they didn' t
see themselves sitting in Cuba and theytook everything away from them. That was
nonsense. That was nonsense and Ithink that that fact, instead of helping
the revolution, what it did wascreate thousands of new enemies, of resentful

(13:56):
people, of hurt people who wereleft with nothing. And whoever says that
' s not true is because hedoesn' t even know what he'
s talking about. I think thatwas one of the worst mistakes made by
the Revolution and that transcends through historyto this day. That' s the
end of all the people who knewhow to do business, the people who

(14:18):
had established their way of doing businessand their way of living cleanly tailored to
the law. All this was destroyedand it was attempted to replace by a
system that was that of the wineryand the notebook, which, still,
sixty years later, is still adisaster, despite how fair it can be.

(14:41):
It' s still a mess.So, that is a very serious
problem that has never been compensated topeople and that has never been recognized as
one of the great nonsenses of thehand of a misperception of history and of

(15:01):
a very wrong calculation of society andof the fabric that was destroying the damage
that was going to be. That' s a clauve mistake. The other
most serious mistake I see was thatof the introduction of compulsory military service,

(15:24):
which lasted three years in principle,because that compulsory military service, which,
if I know that it exists inmany countries, but in a small country
like Cuba, that when Cuba,when it trips revolution, would have barely
believed that there were six million inhabitants. If I' m not wrong,

(15:46):
and that was the first mistake,the first error of the illustration, because
I don' t think it wouldtake three years to train a person in
military art and, that is,to friar thousands, tens of billions of
young people in the family, thingsthat in Cuba, that had never been

(16:10):
seen because the army was professional andto take them to some bad death camps
that were like they were all ofbad death, they were bad living in
those places. It has to havebeen a psychological shock, very strong and
I also met many people who toldme about how they lived, who even

(16:32):
slept under the trees and there wasa patriotic spirit and a lot of accepting
those as a van to serve thecountry, etcetera. But actually, I
think it was a mistake. Justas I think it was a mistake the
enormous amount of money spent on anarmy like the Cuban, which was oversized,

(16:59):
a larger army in Latin America,became the Cuban. That was a
mistake. One had to find anothersolution. I am not a strategist,
nor am I in the solution athand, but those in the army,
those in the power of leading thecountry, had to seek a solution that

(17:19):
would not uproot and remove from productionmillions of Cubans who could contribute economically to
the country. That was the otherhard blow to society and that was another
hard blow to the country' seconomy, education and culture. The huge

(17:41):
retro blow that was given was thefamous harvest of the seventies, that harvest
that has so many stories behind itwhere it was intended to make ten million
tons of sugar and in reality notmade the ten million, but the way

(18:04):
to lie to inflate plans, togive numbers, say in quotation marks,
beautiful and cheerful to please the leaderswas intruded. My grandfather, once again,
my grandfather because he was a peasantand participated in many of those things.

(18:26):
He told me the story of howwhen the meetings were held to decide
how many of these figures would begiven to the government of the reeds that
could be cut off Yes, thecane shoots that could be arranged in a
certain place, for example, likethe manatee that was where he worked,

(18:48):
and when the foremen people who hadbeen working for forty- fifty years and
said that that cane could not becut because that reed was not ready for
those harvests, they were immediate,dismissed and immediately branded as counter- revolutionary
and humiliated, they were persecuted.And that happened. That' s true.

(19:11):
And that' s not what mygrandfather told me because my grandfather didn
' t tell me in the formof a lie or a legend. He
told me because my grandfather knows whathe was talking about. My grandfather knew
what he was saying and he wasn' t a lying agent. And likewise,
the people who sowed the cane toldhim that they had to do something
that was literally impossible. And whenthey said that that could not be done,

(19:36):
the people who were in charge ofthem were voting for work, taking
measurements with them. They were notpaid, that is, intimidated by why,
because what the Government had to doat that time was a huge mistake.
I don' t know if inthe end, in the government to

(19:59):
the higher levels that was known ornot I don' t have the information
for that, but somehow they wereresponsible for what was happening, if they
were responsible for that was destroying andthreatening people who really knew because it was
necessary to please a certain certain headshipor authority in order to fill out papers

(20:33):
and say that it could be donewhen someone knew, when someone knew the
truth that that was impossible. Someother people also told me stories about that
famous Zafra, and all they toldme was destruction How they even got to
the warehouses where the supplies were,the shelters, where the cane cutters were,

(21:00):
and took any amount of unchecked productsto resell it. For it was
a simple disaster plainly uncombustible. Allthat was a two- handed stealer.
As we say, there is aneconomic disaster in Cuba. I don'

(21:22):
t know if there are the figuresfor what was spent to do those affors,
but I imagine that if they exist, it must be something creepy,
because in addition they closed down workcenters to go to people to cut canes.
That workplace ceased to function and,despite all that, errors were not
rectified throughout history. Until the 1980suntil the 1990s, so much was still

(21:49):
being done. Work centers were closedso that people would be cut to sow
canes or clean canes to fulfill plans, etcetera, etcetera. Traera is a
sample of the improvisation, mediocrity andlack of economic knowledge that exists. So,

(22:14):
that was another very serious mistake.The third mistake I attribute, which
could not be solved or solved,was the creation of schools in the countryside.
The young people had already been uprootedby taking the three years away from
their family, their friends, theirneighbourhood, creating problems of all kinds,

(22:37):
because all kinds of people were mixedthere. Then they also do what was
called schools in the countryside, pre- schools in the countryside, and high
school in the countryside. With thesame principle, all the young men,
boys, preteens, almost a childwould get out of the family and go

(23:02):
to work in the countryside, tobe close to the countryside, to help
the revolution. Anyway, it wasme, yes, I was at that
stage. I knew what that wasand I' m not afraid of working,
I' m not afraid of thecountry, I' m not afraid
of anything. I am a personwho faces his difficulties, but I saw

(23:25):
what that was. I was inthe pre in the field for three years
and the amount of nonsense and theamount of stoning resources in those places given
to make a book of what shouldnot be done in an educational system.
Starting from schools that were in verybad technical conditions, almost all of them,

(23:51):
almost all of ninety percent, Iwent through more than one because it
had to be closed, because itwas not viviable. The amount, in
fact, criminal and van dalus thatoccurred in those places, the massive fights
between students in which even teachers participated, injuries of all kinds. I even

(24:14):
lived that it is tremendous suicide attempts, because there were children, children,
because we were children, we werejust fourteen fifteen years old and we were
away from the family and there weresome who couldn' t stand those and
ran away from the places. Andthen, to make it worse, there

(24:37):
was something called the Court, theschool court, which was held once every
fortnight, where the mistakes of everyyoung man or boy had to be exposed.
There he defended everyone and recognized itand how I know it and how
much I know, and that gaveyou and took away points so that I
could go out to see your family. It is an aberrant thing, completely

(25:00):
aberrant, and I think that ofall this mistakes, the Government has never
apologized, nor have the leaders apologizedfor all the harm they did to the
family or to those young people.And I think that to start fixing the
country, to start healing hurt,to start having a better, prosperous nation

(25:23):
of returning hope to people. Thefirst thing to do is recognize all the
mistakes, but recognize them really,face to face, looking at people and
saying we' re going to bea better country. I want to be
socialist, well, be socialist,work, but work for your people.

(25:44):
I want to be a communist,but I brought it for your people?
I want to be a capitalist,so be it, but work for your
people? So much legal intramama thatexists, so many regulations that exist and
still have to resort to the threat, They have to resort to the coercions

(26:04):
to achieve things And, unfortunately,always from the triumphalist discourse, from the
inflation of numbers and from the slogans. So we will never have a prosperous
country. So we will never bea nation we feel proud of, nor
will we be the country where peopleare happy to be and do not want

(26:32):
to leave. This according to myviews, this that I pointed out first
in the other podcast, the problemof education and now that I also consider
are the essential problems that Cuba hashad through its coming and as you see
are problems that have as center thehuman being. So I think that you

(27:00):
like Cubans, like the big familythat we are, because I say there
is no one who renounces being whatit is. And the people who say
I' m not Cuban is becausethey have a pain inside that can'
t get over it. All thosepeople who leave the country and say no
I don' t want to bein Cuba, I' m not Cuban,

(27:21):
I wasn' t born in mycountry, in the wrong country,
It' s because it has agreat pain inside, because whenever it couldn
' t be in your country what, however, in another place what you
achieved feeling always foreign and foreign.That is the raw and the reality,

(27:44):
the raw truth, and that mustbe assumed as a person, as a
people and as a nation. Andthis is very important because when we begin
to assume I am with the eyesresponsible. Ask for forgiveness, but ask
at the same time that we areall that we get back to Cuba,

(28:11):
to the economy, to society.When that happens and we all feel part
of a greater work, of acountry project that is worth defending and not
of a country where no one wantsto live, then we will begin the

(28:33):
rebirth of the Cuban nation, therebirth of the Cuban nation, all together
with the kind of idea we have, but all together as a family,
without allowing there to be many,as there has always been in all the
nations and in all the countries thathave had the history of the world,

(28:57):
to lend themselves to living, thesuffering, the suffering of their brothers,
of blood, of their brothers onearth, of their compatriots. When that
happens, we' re going tomake a better country and we' re
going to stop being the world's astonishment at the huge war that always

(29:21):
exists between Cubans who left, amongthose who stayed, among those who mock
the same neighbors who left behind sufferingvicissitudes and those who lend themselves to it.
As the poet Peones del Veneno said, we are going to do an

(29:42):
exercise of reflection, we are goingto think as a nation, as a
Cuban and we are going to tryto return to our country the joy they
lack, to the joy that wewere symbols in the world and that it
has been lost, to return toour country the hope that there is something

(30:07):
better ahead and that it does somethingbetter not to leave the country, but
to work together to make a beautifulnation wonderful all together and to be proud
of that work. Thank you allvery much. I hope you like this
podcast and we will continue to talkabout it in the near future. If

(30:30):
you want to leave the comments,you can leave them in the comment box
and I can read it. Thankyou all very much. A hug gives
to you, mister quo until laterbye