Trump Lacks Dignity

Mentioning Donald Trump in Cuba was already a bad word, an insult, but since last May 20, it has become a genuine expression of evil and impudence. The U.S. president and his vice president, Mike Pence, with their neocolonial messages, were discredited in the eyes of Cubans, who were in full mourning on the island.

If these are the people who want a better future for Cuba, they can save their predictions. It was the 20th day of the fifth month of 1902 when our country obtained its “independence,” without the involvement of the Liberation Army and the Cuban Revolutionary Party and crushed by an amendment added to a battered constitution.* They persistently proceed against the true Cuban will.

That date has been used by some U.S. presidents to try to make us uncomfortable, because they are aware that no one on the island is willing to celebrate it. On the current calendar it is just a number with no greater meaning. What is unprecedented in Trump’s message is that condolences for the plane crash in Havana, in which more than 100 people perished, are absent.

What a contrast between the real estate tycoon’s attitude and the flight arranged by Venezuelan President Maduro so that relatives of the victims who were in Venezuela could fly to the island as soon as possible. The difference is like night and day. How much value there is in the solidarity of Evo, Pope Francisco, Daniel Ortega, Putin, Maradona, Zelaya, Laura Pausini, Enrique Peña Nieto, Justin Trudeau, Juan Carlos Varela, the King of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, Xi Jinping, the chancellery of Chile, Adolfo Perez Esquivel. A sea of sensitive voices calling, with a sense of tribute separated from any ideological difference, to erase these circumstances.

Trump’s sympathy disappears with each barbarity. The same Trump installed an embassy in Jerusalem, knowing how complicated that city is in the Arab context, threw rolls of toilet paper at Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and withdrew the United States from a nuclear agreement with Iran which is very important for peaceful coexistence.

Why did he mention Marti and Maceo** in his cynical message, written by advisers working under the Marco Rubio brand? I doubt that he knows anything of their glorious trajectories or of the meaning of the two, even in the most recondite little school of the Turquino Plan*** (the antithesis of the Bush Plan), in whose geography the Golden Age and the Protest of Baragua are synonymous with Cubans.

What does he know about the resilience of the Cuban people or our “contributions to the world of literature, the arts, music, cuisine and business” if he imposes hard measures and obstacles in order to make life more complex and turn us against the revolution, a practice that has been common in Yankee history.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be ashamed to see how he uses their names in such an affront, worthy of the twisted mind of any anti-Cuban. In the hands of Washington and Jefferson, executive orders would soften the blockade, that Nazi-fascist mechanism on account of which the island cannot buy a first world or last generation aircraft. No sense of guilt emerges in the north’s arrogance.

With school shooting after school shooting, Trump could have expressed pain over the loss of the Boeing 737-200, leased by Cubana de Aviacion. Trump and Pence lack the only thing we have left: dignity.

His democracy through bombing (a concept he loves to be the torchbearer of) has been deplorable for a while. For my archipelago, I do not want the National Rifle Association, or CIA or FBI. Much time has passed between May 20, 1902 and now; but since 1959, time has stood still.

*Editor’s Note: The author is referring to the Platt Amendment, imposed by the United States as a condition for the withdrawal of its forces in Cuba in 1902.

** Editor’s Note: The author is referring to Jose Marti and Jose Antonio de la Caridad Maceo y Grajales, leaders of the Cuban War of Independence in the 1890s.

*** Editor’s Note: The Turquino Plan is a Cuban plan for the development of its mountain regions.