Last week, Cuban dissidents held a public meeting in Havana. That caught a lot of peoples' attention because Fidel and Co. never let that happen. But as Randy Paul noted, one of the more curious things about the confab was that top democratic dissident Oswaldo Payá skipped it:
"[The organizers ] don't represent the majority of the opposition, or even the most important groups,'' said Payá, lead organizer of the Varela Project democracy effort. "It's a smoke screen.''
So what was Payá's beef? Marc Cooper explains and in the process takes a solid swing at the U.S.'s Cuba policy and the left's often lame response to it:
U.S. diplomatic representatives did attend the meeting and the delegates listened to a tape-recorded greeting from that renown Freedom Fighter, G.W. Bush. This, of course, is the kiss of death in Cuba. And not just among Fidelistas. Some of the more prominent dissident leaders, indeed, boycotted the weekend meeting precisely because they felt it was too closely aligned with the U.S. and with the more frothy exiles in Miami.
Ignored (when not scorned) by both the Right and the Left, there is a tenuous current of democratic dissidents in both Miami and Havana who want no part of either Castro or Bush. These folks should be the key players in Cuba’s inevitable post-Castro transition.
I have argued for some years now that the longer Fidel clings to power, and the longer the democratic dissidents are snubbed, the farther and harder to the right Cuba will fall after Castro. The best way to guarantee that the next Cuban regime will be a mafia-dominated dictatorship is to continue the current paradigm—the absolutely stupid polarization of Cuba’s future as either pro or anti-Castro.
That the Neanderthal Right should promote this thinking is perfectly logical. It’s in their favor. But why the continuing silence of most of the American Left on Castro? Why is it left only to Nat Hentoff to speak out? What does it tell us that a great civil liberties lion like Nat is left to publish his op-ed piece in the Washington Times? Why isn’t it on the front page of some other magazines that I could think of?
A radio crackles to life through thin, crisp mountain air at 5,000 feet above sea level, due east of Inskip above Paradise. An automated reading from a lunar lander-looking gizmo repeats, "Wind speed: 1 mph, temperature: 60 degrees, relative humidity: 40 percent, fuel moisture: 13.7."
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Posted by: Nickolas | October 29, 2010 at 04:20 PM