Over the past week or so, there have been several news articles showcasing new photos Beyonce and Jay-Z released from their vacation in apartheid Cuba. It is really astonishing to see how this extremely wealthy and powerful American couple allowed themselves to be used as tools by the repressive and racist, white dictatorship in Cuba. Obviously, musical talent and business acumen is simply not enough to prevent these two from acting and appearing like insensitive dolts.
The Cuba portrayed in Beyonce and Jay-Z’s vacation album is the Cuba only tourists see. It is the Potemkin Village, the Castro zoo, where enslaved Cubans are displayed in their cages for tourists to gawk at and take pictures. It is the Cuba where champagne flows freely, every restaurant has steak and lobster, and the air-conditioning runs all day and all night. Beyonce and Jay-Z’s Cuba is one typical Cubans can only imagine for they are prohibited by their white slave masters from enjoying. It is a Cuba where being black is the proverbial black mark, where white slaves are treated differently from the black slaves.
The real Cuba is a much different island from what Beyonce and Jay-Z limited themselves to seeing. It is a heinous and heartbreaking place where innocent victims, the majority of them black, are rotting in prison cells for speaking out against their enslavement. It is a place where slaves must struggle daily to find enough food to eat, risking arrest and prison if they are caught taking a scrap of food from a trashcan outside a tourist hotel. It is the place where dissidents are ruthlessly beaten, unjustly imprisoned, and brutally murdered.
This is the Cuba Beyonce and Jay-Z never saw, and apparently the Cuba they have no interest in seeing.
The real Cuba is the island where black rapper Yunier Ramon remains imprisoned in a Castro gulag for performing music that criticizes his white slave masters. He was already in prison when Beyonce and Jay-Z visited Cuba, but neither of them bothered to say a word about him, let alone visit a fellow artist in need.
You see, Beyonce and Jay-Z have no interest in the real Cuba; they only want to sip cognac and smoke Cuban cigars in air-conditioned comfort while in the company of the island’s slave masters.
Astonishing.
Yes, this was a tourist vacation. Yes, their official “clearance” was bogus. Yes, they’re totally full of it. Trouble is, they’re perfectly representative of their kind, meaning they’re “normal,” and the anonymous hordes of foreign tourists to Cuba actually do far more harm, as they’ve been doing for years. We still can’t come to grips with the fact that, for practical purposes, we’re alone in this as we always have been, and we will never be supported or bailed out like South Africa was. All we can effectively do is what WE can do, ourselves, as Cubans, in and out of the island. But yes, this includes calling bullshit, and more importantly, remembering it and acting accordingly, because merely complaining about it does very little.
I especially liked the pics with quaint “revolutionary” decay as backdrop to the excruciatingly primped and accessorized would-be diva and her “thug.” Just keeping it real, you understand.
Can you imagine what Beyonce paid to have her hair done like that? How can she possibly have ANY clue what life is like for the average Cuban woman, especially if she’s black?