If anyone would have asked me twenty, fifteen, even ten years ago what my wish would be for Babalu Blog when it turned 20 years old I’d have said that my greatest wish would be for it to be documenting the rebuilding of a nation, from within that nation, from the ashes of 50 or 60 years of communism. That Babalu Blog would be a part of bringing that island back to life somehow. That, after 20 years of hard work, the real hard work of resuscitation would have begun, and that we would have been there with our sleeves rolled up.
I don’t think I could have imagined that in the year 2023, absolutely nothing had essentially changed in Cuba. Basic liberties are still non-existent. Human rights are still violated. Political and ideological prisoners abound. And not only would the rot and stench of communism still be pervasive, but that there would still be people cheerleading for the cause of that rot, despite standing neck deep in the fetid carcass.
Unimaginable, to me, twenty years ago. And yet. . . here we are.
We now live in a world so foreign to me, so foreign to reality, where even the definition of “woman” is elusive to some, yet those very same people applaud weak men pretending to be ugly women so they – the ugly women – can go against and beat real women in athletic competition. And we have a media that ignore the painfully obvious unfairness, the painfully obvious biology, and the painfully obvious absurdity of it all and cheerlead for those ugly ‘women.’
A tainted and overwhelmingly biased media has always been a given to those of us who follow Cuba – The New York Times did serve to put fidel castro in power after all – but during the last few years the media’s abject bias has been undisguised, and a whole lot of people have fallen off the turnip truck. There is no such thing as integrity in the media anymore. None, nada, zilch, zero, nicojones.
And this is why Cuba is still stagnant and why the rest of the world is following suit.
Which brings me to this: for twenty years, the the editors and contributors to Babalu Blog have toiled earnestly and tirelessly, frankly and selflessly, without compensation or personal gain, to expose the truth about Cuba with the integrity that truth demands. If anyone asks me today what I am most proud of, twenty years after the very first post on this blog, it is that.
A lie has speed, but the truth has endurance.