In Defense of the Cuban People

Today I am risking being insulted, having some radicals stop reading me or following me on Twitter, and who knows what else, but I truly can no longer bear the pain I feel every time I hear or see, in the media and on social networks, people speaking carelessly about “the Cubans.”

Many of those who want to attack the Castro regime generalize by talking about “the Cubans,” and in doing so they make a serious mistake. It is a bit like people outside the country who want to criticize the Venezuelan government and start speaking badly of “the Venezuelans.”

For some time now, to my great surprise, my weekly column has been read by some Cubans who live in Cuba and are lucky enough to be able to go to an internet café. It is incredible how closely they follow the news from Venezuela and how much encouragement they give you to keep fighting. It is very painful when they write to me that they are sure they will never be able to leave the island. I have also heard from Cubans who left Cuba and have not been able to return to their homeland for more than 40 years. These people have suffered, and still suffer, a great deal.

I follow @yoanisanchez, whose blog, lageneraciony.com, has heartbreaking articles. The latest one I read, “From the Washtub to the Washing Machine,” says, in essence, that the authorities like to talk about women’s emancipation in Cuba by pointing to the number of women in parliament or in charge of institutions, scientific centers and companies, but say very little about the sacrifice it takes for them to combine those jobs with an overwhelming load of housework and material shortages. You only have to look at the faces of women over forty, she writes, to see the downturned mouth so common among Cuban women: the mark left by a daily life in which much of the time goes to exhausting, repetitive chores, such as washing clothes by hand, at least a couple of times a week and in very hard conditions, sometimes without running water at home. In that article she published a photo of a completely rusted Russian washing machine from the 1980s, the kind most women there use, because a new one costs a whole year’s salary. That photo is engraved in my mind, and every time I use my washing machine I think of the women of Cuba.

When Pope Benedict XVI went to visit the Cuban Catholics (not the Castro regime, as some said, although I suppose he greeted them out of diplomacy), the stories that reached me were very sad. The Catholics who live there live like true martyrs rather than deny their faith. Thanks to those Catholics, the Castro regime could not destroy, and never will destroy, the Cuban Catholic Church, despite the terrible persecution they live under. A recent example was the traffic “accident” that took the life of the Catholic Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Christian Liberation Movement and a great defender of human and Christian rights on the island.

Let me tell you just one very simple thing so you can understand a little of that people’s suffering. Someone who went for the Pope’s visit told me he was in a square with a modern, colorful thermos hanging around his neck. A young woman came up to him and asked him please to sell it to her for her son. He took it off and gave it to her. He tells me the young woman began to cry like a little girl, sobbing, thanked him a thousand times and “hugged the thermos as if it were a baby.”

We must all know that the Cubans who live in Cuba (except those who support that regime), and many of those who left the island and have not been able to return, are suffering greatly. That is why I beg you to measure your words when you speak of the Castro dictatorship and its accomplices, so as not to generalize. And always remember that we Christians must not insult anyone; the truth can be told in many ways, and with kind words.

I also want to ask you to include the Cuban people in your prayers. I know we are praying hard for Venezuela, but they, like us, very much need God’s help to keep fighting with fortitude and to win their freedom.

I take this opportunity to tell that suffering people that I love you immensely, that I pray for you every day, and that only God knows the good that will come out of so many years of suffering. Never lose hope, and remember at every moment that “Good will always triumph over Evil.”