For the past few days, news coverage of Cuba has consisted mainly of gushing over the regime’s largesse in providing free sex change operations. Even the small news operation with pretensions of grandeur in my town has plastered video of Mariela Castro on the screen. I can just picture all the white bread viewers going “How nice. Why are we still being so mean to them?”…which is why Nat Hentoff’s column in the Jewish World Review is so important.
It is a reminder that there will be no DVD’s or Sopranos (or I would add free sex changes) for Elias Biscet, or Jorge Luis Garcia Paneque, or Ivan Hernandez Carrillo, or any of the other hundreds of political prisoners languishing in the Cuban Gulag. In the midst the successor’s propaganda blitz, Hentoff provides his readers not only with a context, but more importantly with the truth.
What is fascinating about that development is the Mariela component.
Here you have a situation in which the daughter of one of the masterminds of the brutal UMAP labor camps is actually one of the most clamorous supporters of the original targets of said camps.
Mariela has certainly made boneheaded statements somewhat supportive of her father and uncle but I have a sneaking suspicion that once the two old codgers are out of the scene – we’re going to be able to hear her real thoughts.
I’ve said it before – most of the children don’t give a rat’s ass about the revolution, and due to the fact that they really don’t speak out about that, well, it speaks of laziness and apathy on their part. Mariela? I can’t quite figure her out.
We shall see.
-AB
Nat Hentoff is a liberal. In the BEST sense of the word he’s a liberal. He has (for as long as I’ve known about him) taken an interest in Biscet and his case. He’s challenged Charles Rangel on his failure to support political prisoners in Cuba (many of which are black). Great column.