Carter, Democracy and the Peanut

He landed on our island just before this rainless April began and a gray March, equally dry, ran out. Dressed in a white, loose-fitting shirt, Jimmy Carter descended the airplane ladder. Carter, who at the end of the sixties had been treated in the official Cuban press with the same negative epithets that previous North American presidents suffered. The government propaganda then delighted in tormenting him, while in the schools the children learned to shout our first anti-imperialist slogans thinking on his blue-eyed face. The newspaper Granma even mocked his origins as producer and seller of peanuts, calling him el manisero, a name that we give here to those that hawk and sell — in the streets of the towns and cities — this dry fruit.

But not only did they shoot insults and denigrating caricatures at the occupant of the White House. In 1980 the migratory explosion from the port of El Mariel flung over his territory more than 100,000 of our compatriots, among them prisoners taken at full speed from the prisons and mental illness patients from various mental hospitals. Carter could not sustain the pressure of such an avalanche, and he found himself obligated to close acceptance of those desperate immigrants that arrived with hardly the clothes on their backs. It was a battle won by Fidel Castro, who from the platform shouted: “Let the scum go, let them go!” masking the ideological extremism under the carefree pose of the revolutionary euphoria. Those were also the days of the birth of the so-called “rallies of repudiation,” in those which the frenzied crowds spit, stoned and threw eggs or excrement at “the infamous traitors” that did not want to continue hoping for the promised socialist paradise.

Jimmy Carter was not reelected president, some say, among other reasons, for his unwise performance during that migratory crisis. Then Ronald Reagan succeeded him, whose Hollywood actor’s face fallen on hard times changed him into the new image to injure in the Cuban press. “El manisero” founded, in 1982, the Carter Center of Emory University, concentrating on his work as mediator and observer of peace processes, even winning the Nobel Peace Prize 20 years later.

In a turn never before experienced, our official newspapers abruptly changed the manner of referring to the ex-commander of the armed forces of the United States. He came to be simply Mr. Carter, and for when he visited our country in 2002, the announcers presented him simply as a personal friend of Máximo Líder. Those children — now grown — who at one time had insulted him in the morning school hours were confused by the red carpet rolled out in the airport at the arrival of one who had once been our greatest enemy.

On that occasion, Carter found himself not only with government figures, but he also heard opinions and denouncements of the opposing groups, demonized and banned by the authorities. It was justly in a conference in the grand hall of the University of Habana where the once-respected governor of Georgia mentioned for the first time, before the cameras of national television, the name of Project Varela that, propelled by Osvaldo Payá, proposed a referendum to transform the Constitution and permit freedom of speech and association. After the visitor returned home, and in just a few months, throughout our country a series of detentions known as the Black Spring arose, with long prison sentences for 75 dissidents and independent journalists, especially among the ranks of those collecting signatures to achieve the referendum referred to by Carter.

Almost nine years had to pass for him to return to this island that had given him such headaches. Jimmy Carter spoke last week with Raúl Castro, with his chancellor and even had an aside with various voices of the budding Cuban civil society: the Damas de Blanco and various old political prisoners. On the most important television channel of our country, he referred to the necessity of freedom of speech, of association and of travel so that Cubans could move within and outside of their own national territory. He also threw some flattery to the Raúl government, but it sounded more like diplomatic formalities than true points of consensus.

Before going, various dissidents and alternative bloggers presented him with a collection of popular products made from peanuts. “This is the only commercial line that has never been in state hands,” we told him, and the veteran of a thousand political battles smiled. His plane took off, and that Wednesday the island seemed identical to how he had found it 72 hours before. But something small and miniscule had changed. As imperceptible as a peanut and as deeply native as those paper cones of salted pieces that even now someone hawks in the streets of our country.