What does Israel’s situation have to do with Cuba?

I’m not talking about Cuba’s dictatorship, which is NOT Cuba and might as well live in a different planet compared to ordinary people on the island. It has, of course, sided with Israel’s enemies, as it was bound to do. Let me rephrase the question: What does the world’s response to the Hamas horror have to do with Cuba’s situation?

What does it mean that so many people, even in democratic, non-Islamic countries like the US, have not only failed to side with Israel but have publicly taken the side of unspeakable terror? When have non-Cubans all over the world taken to the streets to demand an end to Cuba’s totalitarian tyranny and call for freedom for its people? How long have we been waiting for the world to do right by Cuba? How long and how hard have we tried to procure the world’s solidarity and its help against the Castro cancer? What has that gotten us after more than 60 years of trying?

Do the math, and you definitely don’t need a calculator.

What goes on in Cuba is like a slow, plodding death with wasted lives, but even for political prisoners, it’s nothing as graphic and dramatic as the orgy of killing and cruelty perpetrated by anti-Israeli terrorists–including torture, rape, burning children to death and beheading infants. If people can ignore that or rationalize it away, if they can excuse and defend that, why on earth would they bat an eye over what goes on in Cuba? Why would they even remotely care, especially when they are sympathetic to the likes of Che Guevara and Cuba’s rulers assiduously curry their favor?

What are we, idiots? Deluded fantasists perpetually waiting for the kindness of strangers? You think because we denounce apartheid conditions in Cuba it’s ever going to be treated anything like South Africa was, no matter how many Cubans are people of color? You think holding up Martin Luther King as a role model is going to get us anywhere with the Congressional Black Caucus or BLM? You think joining or courting Democrats or “progressives” is going to do the trick? Ask the Estefans and the late Carlos Alberto Montaner what that got them–for Cuba, I mean.

We’re not Israel. We’re not the chosen people or an integral part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. We’re not in that league. We used to be good for sugar, cigars and popular music, but even that all went south. There’s no Cuban Einstein. The world’s favorite Cuban is a cheesy histrionic bastard who spent his life in a damn costume and spouting brazen BS while turning Cuba into a parasitic third-world shithole. That does NOT matter, and it’s NEVER going to, except maybe to us. Again, look at how the “good” world has responded to Israel’s plight, and do the math.

So, just as Israel and Jews everywhere need to deal with the hideous reality, we have to stop expecting pears from oak trees. It’s NOT happening. It’s all on Cubans themselves, on and off the island, to do the best they can to solve Cuba’s problem or at least not be part of it. Much of the world is neither blind (except willfully) nor ignorant nor retarded–it’s just perverse, and we can’t fix that, not even in our putative (pun intended) mother and Cain-like “brothers.” We can be a vox clamantis in deserto, since someone has to tell the truth, but let’s not kid ourselves.

P.S. In another telling example of my point above, the New York Times, the “paper of record,” has committed what amounts in effect to blood libel against Israel, and by extension all Jews, via its criminally irresponsible coverage of a bomb blast in a Gaza hospital, a truly explosive story which quickly went viral. Instead of handling it with extreme caution, the NYT immediately published the Palestinian version which blamed Israel. When it turned out the blast was accidentally self-inflicted, the NYT gradually walked back what it had reported but never duly apologized. If an entity controlled by a family with Jewish ancestry could do such a thing to Israel, what would it not do to Cuba?