‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Judging or in Writing ill,
Alexander Pope from “An Essay on Criticism”
I was reminded of those lines today when I came across the latest Albor Ruiz article in the Daily News. It is difficult to tell who’s worse here: Alicia Alonso, the celebrities or the columnist. Detailing the campaign which sprang, spontaneously we are to believe, from the Alonso letter, which read in part:
“Let us work together so that Cuban artists and writers can take their talent to the United States,” Alonso said in her letter, “and that you are not prevented to come to our Island to share your knowledge and values; so that a song, a book, a scientific study or a choreographic work are not considered, in an irrational way, as a crime.”
No, the crime occurs when some idiot goes to the Havana of the elite, gets the dog and pony show, and returns to agitate for the regime against those evil exiles in Miami. It is a crime against nature to value a poem, or a painting, or a dance more than the well being of your fellow man. But that is nothing new to the eternally shriveling harridan, who one supposes must now direct her ministrations to another part of fifo’s anatomy, as the one she was wont to kiss is out of commission.
According to Ruiz, there are hundreds of signatories, among them:
Sean Penn (check)
Danny Glover(check)
Alice Walker; (check)
Harry Belafonte (check)
Ry Cooder (unfortunately check)
Cristina García* (tremendously sad)
They are asking President Bush to:
First, open a respectful dialogue with the government and people of Cuba; second, end the travel ban; third, begin a process to develop normal relations.
Respectful, they say. Martha, get the smelling salts! What planet are these people from? What is there to respect? Murderers? Thieves? Oppressors? A government that could give two farthings, if such things still exist, about the good of its people? And you cannot have a dialogue of one. The people of Cuba cannot “dialogue” because they are forbidden to speak to you.
Ruiz, predictably, uses the story as a springboard to rail yet again against the embargo:
IN WHAT has become a predictable ritual, for 16 years, the world has sent Washington the same strong message: Drop the cruel trade embargo against Cuba.
It seems to me that humanity, if not the world, would have been far better served by denouncing the oppression of the Cuban people by its own government for the past sixteen years. But no, it is the embargo that is cruel.
Well, as Pope also said, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
*I do not hold her point of view against her, although I obviously don’t agree. I am incensed that she would lend her name to a group of people whose agenda has nothing to do with the welfare of Cubans and who have been vicious in their denunciation of people like her, Cuban Americans
Regardless of whatever artistic ability Alonso once had, this painted hag, who’s lived like a queen for decades in exchange for her unfailing “services” to a horrendous tyranny, is really an artsy version of that vulgar thug Perez Roque.
Like him, like a dog (or rather, a bitch), she barks on cue whenever and however she’s told. Even if, instead of being one of numerous remarkable ballerinas, she had been the greatest ballerina ever, she would still be a seriously stinking piece of shit as a human being. She has betrayed her country and her people, she has completely disgraced herself, and she deserves nothing but scorn or, at best, an appalled pity that someone with real talent could sink so low.
If someone like the renowned writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who also had real talent, had played her game, he would have had a very real shot at the Nobel Prize for literature (just like Argentina’s Borges would have won it if he’d been suitably leftist). If Ernesto Lecuona, who was far more important to Cuban culture than Alonso, had played her game, instead of dying in exile, he would also have remained a very big shot in Cuba. However, everyone is not a prostitute. Sadly, far too many have been.
“The Stars come out” title has now been officially changed to “The Comemierdas Come Out”