On the surface, it looks as if this most unusual Cuban refugee is trying to help the Cuban people by helping entrepreneurs open their own businesses.
But anyone who knows the way in which the Castro regime controls all businesses will be highly skeptical.
When all is said and done, there is no such thing as private enterprise in Castrogonia.
So, who is going to benefit from the microloans this duchess aims to provide? Ultimately, it will be the Castro regime.
The duchess is on good terms with the Castro brothers. Fidel sent her flowers when she became engaged to the heir to the Luxembourgian throne. (Such a sweet gesture from a communist monster!) And she has met with him in Havana, thanks to a ñangara relative who was close to the tyrant.
“He [Fidel] is neither a friend nor an enemy,” says the duchess.
And she is “very happy” with the Normalization Circus, though she admits she is clueless and really doesn’t know much about what is happening in Castrogonia.
From Granma Lite (Associated Press)
Luxembourg duchess seeks return to Cuba to develop microfinance
She fled Cuba with her bourgeois family as revolution brewed, and later married into one of Europe’s royal dynasties.Today, as the Communist-ruled island emerges from long economic isolation, Luxembourg’s Grand Duchess Maria Teresa says she hopes to return home to pitch the cause of micro-credit to help the country’s poor.
A Unesco goodwill ambassador, Maria Teresa, 59, has long championed collateral-free seed loans to help families set up businesses to haul themselves out of poverty – the system famously set up by Bangladeshi Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.
She has backed projects in countries as diverse as Nepal, Mali, Thailand, Laos and Bosnia, and hopes that Cuba, too, can benefit.
“From an economic point of view, there is an enormous amount to be done for (Cuba),” the wife of Grand Duke Henri, the monarch of the tiny but wealthy EU nation, said in an interview with AFP. “(…) The Cuban population has suffered greatly for very many years.” She added: “One thing that would give me enormous pleasure would be to travel to Cuba with Professor Yunus to launch microfinance.
“It’s something I feel very passionate about. I don’t know if the situation economically is right or if the political opening is sufficient and ready to do it now, but it’s a dream I have.” In 1959, Maria Teresa’s family, a banking dynasty of Spanish descent called the Mestres, fled Cuba, leaving behind a business empire that would be confiscated by Fidel Castro’s revolution.
The Havana-born duchess admitted it would not be easy going back to a country where Castro, 89, is still living and which is still run by his brother Raul following Castro’s retirement due to ill health.
“He is neither a friend nor an enemy. He is someone because of whom my whole family had to leave the island of Cuba. This is not an easy situation,” she said.
However when Maria Teresa became engaged to marry Henri, then the heir to the Luxembourg throne, on November 7, 1980, Fidel Castro was the first to congratulate her.
“The first bouquet that arrived at the palace was a huge bunch of roses with a card from Fidel Castro, with all his congratulations,” she recalled.
Following her marriage in February 1981, and her husband’s accession to the throne in October 2000, she met Castro in Havana through the efforts of a first cousin who was close to the Castro regime.
She said the opening up of Cuba and the end of the US trade embargo made her “very happy” for the Cuban population.
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Great. Another embarrassment. She sounds like a clueless, ditzy airhead, not to mention a dilettante playing at economics. And of course, there’s the obligatory but undignified (not to say contemptible) fence-sitting regarding Nosferatu and, by extension, his “revolution.” Fidel Castro is the enemy of ANY decent Cuban who loves his country and values freedom and justice–but hey, I’m glad she got some nice flowers from him, which she apparently accepted. Did it not occur to the woman that seeking out an audience with the Maximum Monster was demeaning and beneath her, or certainly should have been? Really, you can’t make this stuff up. Talk about a flagrant lack of noblesse oblige. This is a classic example of the concept that if you’re not part of the solution, at least don’t be part of the problem. Please, just get this person out of my face. There are at least three strikes against her, meaning she’s OUT.
I’m extremely disappointed with Maria Teresa Mestre, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. Her maternal lineage is striking and her father’s while not as impressive as her mother’s is, also, remarkable. I believe that her father is related to the fame Mestre brothers who founded the CMQ TV and radio station in Cuba which at the time was by far the most advanced in all of Latin America, a TV station that was so advanced that during a baseball game in the US, they had a plane with an antenna fly between the US and Cuba in order to transmit the game live to Cuba, a singular feat at the time when TV was in its neonatal stage.
Her mother’s family was founded when an Irish man from Monserrat by the name of Richard O’Daly O’Farrill liquidated his plantation and moved to Cuba in 1690 with 100 slaves. He brought a plantation and founded the English Slave Company. He had a fleet of ships and a license to sell slaves to the entire Caribbean region. The slave trade in the 17th century was so lucrative that he became the richest man in all of Cuba and married a creole countess. His granddaughter then married into another wealthy plantation family the Montalvo’s. If anybody has everr read the classic, Cecilia Valdés, the main character is a Montalvo. This is not a coincidence. It is based on Maria Teresa’s ancestors. Her family to Cuba is essentially what the Astors are to the USA., the creme de la creme. Through her veins, one finds all of the patrician families, she has a long list of counts, grandees to the Court of Spain and even colonial governors. Her family helped found many of Cuba’s institutions like La Casa Cuna, the Cancer Hospital and others. Walking through Old Havana, their colonial mansions are still standing and the churches that they used to support.
How this woman can say that she feels indifferent to fidel castro a man who destroyed her family is beyond me. Yes, fidel destroyed all of our families, but her family had deeper roots, her family helped built the nation from its birth. Her vast family’s fingerprints are everywhere. I don’t know how she could have stooped so low as to have sat and talked with that filthy, low-life, upstart piece of rabble garbage that is fidel castro. By the way, weren’t people like Maria Teresa his ideological enemies? Wasn’t his “revolution” a marxist “revolution” against wealthy exploiters like the Grand Duchesses family was supposed to have been? This singular event of him sending her flowers proves that fidel castro was always about himself and rising above others. He hated Cuba’s aristocracy not because they exploited the poor, but because he wanted to be one of them. What a sick bastard castro is and what a disappointment Maria Teresa has turned out to be.
He sent her flowers because he figured she might be receptive to such a hypocritical and opportunistic gesture, as she apparently more or less was (or eventually became), when she should have found it both viscerally repellent and insulting. The idea was probably to soften her up so that, as a prominent Cuban regularly hobnobbing with royalty from all over Europe, she might promote “tolerance” of Castro, Inc. or would at least refrain from being overtly anti-Castro among her many very highly-placed contacts. I expect those flowers were not the only “conciliatory” gesture or calculated inducement proffered by the regime to neutralize her, if not get her to play ball in some fashion. Evidently, she’s doing or prepared to do a kind of Fanjul/Saladrigas number, so somebody had the right idea and gauged her correctly.
Disappointing hardly begins to cover it. I have no doubt José Martí would have been dismayed, but unfortunately her behavior is far more Cuban than his. Nobility? Technically, I suppose, but hardly worth a bow. Class? Of a certain sort, but nothing like what Martí had, which is not about pedigree, status or money. Frankly, she looks quite ordinary and not especially bright, though she may try hard enough. As my mother would say, “luce bastante escasa,” and as I would say, “luce bastante comemierda.”
You’re right Asombra, he gaged the threat that such a high profile Cuban could mean to his regime if she had decided to use her station and stature against his tyranny.
I expect part of her problem is that, even though she represents a tiny minority of pre-Castro Cuban society, she fits the stereotype of rich, high-society, upper class people who fled the “revolution,” and who have been demonized as evil oligarchs and heartless exploiters of the masses. This means she may feel vulnerable to attack or defamation and doesn’t want that card played against her, which the Castro people are more than capable of playing if she crosses them, especially if there’s slave trading in her family history.
Also, she lives and moves in a very European context, and we all know how Europe rolls regarding Cuba, so she’s under pressure to “be reasonable” and to avoid “ponerse pesada.” I’m sure people in her quaint little country would not look kindly on serious anti-Castro activism from their Grand Duchess, who’s supposed to be a mainly decorative figure in what amounts to an operetta setting. However, while I could understand her leaving the Cuba thing alone, there’s absolutely no excuse for playing into the hands of Castro, Inc. in any way, shape or form, or even giving that impression. Her conduct should give no hint of impropriety in that regard, and obviously her conduct regarding Cuba has been dubious at best. As I keep saying, even if one is not part of the solution, one should at least not contribute to the problem.