The Miami Cave

Those who live in caves are used to seeing in the dark. The same types of people who kidnapped Elian Gonzalez in Miami, between 1999 and 2000, took part in another huge act of infamy of international transcendence 10 years before.

On June 24, 1990, Nelson Mandela arrived at this city’s airport. He came at the invitation of local organizations that wanted to pay a personal tribute to his constant struggle for freedom and justice in his country. It was just four months after he had been released from 27 years in the prisons of the racist and apartheid government of South Africa, his home country.

The troglodytes of the Miami Cuban-American extreme right buried themselves in the mud of history by declaring persona non grata the man whom, at the time, the world was praising and honoring for his tireless struggle for racial equality. The Miami crowd used whistles, balloons and noisemakers, as if it was New Year’s Eve. Besides declaring him persona non grata, they paid for a full-page ad in the local newspaper demanding the visitor retract statements he had made in reference to Cuba, the revolution and its leader, Fidel Castro. They flew a propaganda airplane over the Convention Center where the tribute was underway and stood on the sidewalk in front of the premises to protest his presence.

As in the case of Elian almost 10 years later, this irrational reaction of the Creole cave dwellers brought condemnation from the rest of the communities, especially the black community, which immediately began a boycott of the resorts in this county, costing it the millions of dollars that did not flow into the local economy because of the conferences that were canceled during the three years of protest.

Miami was the only city in the world that produced such a despicable act of repudiation against a man who had sacrificed much of his life to defend a just cause. They had to have been blinded by the light to have expected Nelson Mandela to repudiate the leader of the Cuban revolution. Cuba, which had fought against the racist South African forces in Angola and Namibia, always maintained a policy of condemning the apartheid regime of the great African country, supporting with its actions the cause of the black South African leader and also demanding his release.

Only the mentally ill of the Cuban extreme right could conceive of the idea that Mandela would make statements against Cuba, its revolution and its leader. A man loyal to his cause and ideals cannot betray himself, and Mandela was always that kind of man, as he proved over and over again. Several years after his release, he was elected president of his country, and his government was a government of love and peace, of unity among all South Africans, without hatred toward his jailers, extending an olive branch to his former enemies.

Anyone would understand if his long imprisonment had filled his heart with hatred, but the opposite happened. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with his jailer. He sang the national anthem of his country at his inauguration ceremony, had lunch with the widow of the official who ordered his imprisonment and, at all times, maintained a policy of racial unity.

From prison, he became a leader, and not only in his country. His cause crossed South African borders and spread to all corners of the world. He completed his five-year presidential term and quietly retired with the same quiet simplicity and decency with which he had begun.

Mandela had been a global icon who dedicated his entire life to fight for the respect of the dignity of all human beings, especially men of his race, who have suffered so much discrimination and exploitation, not only on the continent where they are the overwhelming majority, but also in every country where black men have been harassed, humiliated, exploited and discriminated against by men of other races. Mandela has left the physical world but remains alive in the consciousness of all beings who see racial discrimination as a despicable scourge of mankind.

When racist and discriminatory whites of the ultra-right-wing, Cuban-American Miami circles repudiated him in 1990, they were actually doing a favor for such a great leader.

Mandela did not need the applause of these cave dwellers. The light that emanated from him was too much for these people who persisted, and still persist, in being locked alone in the depths of their caves.