Intellectuals and Castroism

By: Pedro Corzo - 06/05/2024

Guest columnist.
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What drives many intellectuals to voluntarily submit to the authority of a despot? It is a question that burdens many ordinary citizens, because it is inconceivable that people who may be among those who lose the most in an autocratic society, are among those most willing to pay tribute to a tyranny.

This new reflection on intellectuals who voluntarily submit to an oppressor is relevant to the recent First International Book Fair that took place in Tampa, a poor imitation of the First Cuban Exile Book Fair that took place in Miami in 2015, sponsored by the journalist and writer Silvio Mancha and several exile organizations.

The Tampa Fair was marred by the presence and participation of intellectuals organic to Castroism. Subjects who create narratives to cover the failures and abuses of the Havana regime and even sign documents in which they support the ignominies of the dictatorship, as did Francisco López Sacha and Rigoberto Rodríguez Entenza, signatories of the letter that in 2022 endorsed the repression of the peaceful protests in Cuba against Dr. Castro and his lackeys. Let me clarify, not all the servants live on the Island.

Cuban totalitarianism has been an absolute failure, but it is undeniable that other successes must be added to its ability to survive, highlighting the talent for repression and the ability it has demonstrated to recruit servants in the field of creation, specifically in the media and literature.

Usually the intellectual is an individual who flees from commitments. His freedom to do and think are the essential passports of his spirit. They are iconoclasts, protesters and destroyers of schemes. However, apparently, in the condition of the titled organic creator there is a hidden receptacle that treasures a vulgar and cruel primitivism. A place where tempestuous passions wait for someone who, when tense, provokes reactions that cloud his critical consciousness. And in this we must recognize again that Castroism has been successful because it has bought or seduced many creators.

It is true that there are authors who break into a controlled world, subject to a supreme authority, such as the cases of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, where the new producers are subject to the guidelines that their predecessors created with their genuflex behaviors.

In these cases, an inevitable period of learning and upheaval is understandable that will determine whether you are a free citizen or another halberdier; however, those who preceded those who are in the process of immersion or rupture are burdened with the guilt of having created the quagmire that the intellectuals of the new generations in each of the aforementioned countries have had to go through.

Castroism does not rest. Spying and infiltrating free societies with his hitmen is his life mission, with universities being his main focus of attraction since they have recruited several enlightened people who have served him with devotion.

You cannot be naive with Castroism. In Cuba there is no NGO linked to the government that is free, much less the Union of Writers of Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), one of the main creative focuses of the dictatorship. Machinery at the service of repression and lies from the very day it was founded, as well as cultural exchanges when the oppressor is the one who sets the conditions for it.

The novelist and writer Jose Antonio Albertini, who wrote his first novel in Cuba clandestinely, in addition to secretly removing it from the Island, was one of the first to denounce Castro's penetration of the Tampa Fair, describing those from the UNEAC as “ “excremental riflemen of the false Castro enlightenment.” Albertini recalls that on occasions the servitude of Castroism has tried to influence the Miami Book Fair, in addition, we must not forget that the distinguished poet Ángel Cuadra, an intellectual committed to freedom and democracy, was erased from those exhibitions due to a dispute between political character with a publisher.

No person with common sense denies how vital it is for the future of Cuba that their children know each other and work together, but those who defend totalitarianism should not and cannot participate in this task because that system destroyed the republic and risks the nation.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».