Donald Trump’s Ignorance about Cuba

Elio Delgado Legon

HAVANA TIMES — The current president of the United States, Donald Trump, has given crystal clear displays of his obsession to reverse everything his predecessor Barack Obama did, in all fields: military, political, economic and scientific.

In his own country, he has done everything he can to dismantle the healthcare system for vulnerable people, which favored several million US citizens who lacked health insurance and was called Obama Care. He has also taken drastic measures to prevent immigrants from entering the country and he is obsessed with building an uncrossable wall on the US southern border to stop Latin Americans from entering.

Internationally, he has withdrawn the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, he has ordered that the Free Trade Agreement be renegotiated with Mexico and Canada, he has left the Iran Nuclear Deal, as well as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. In addition to all of this, he has approved an increase in the state budget on the military which was already very high, which forebodes new attacks and new tensions, as well as those that already exist with North Korea.

When it comes to relations with Cuba, he has shown complete ignorance about the country’s situation, its political system and its history. When the Revolution’s Comandante en Jefe, Fidel Castro Ruz passed away, Mr. President of the Empire wrote, among other things, the following words:

“Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.” 

First of all, these are words that lack all courtesy and respect, but they also reveal his ignorance. The only thing he is doing is repeating what the most hardcore enemies of the Revolution say, those who still haven’t been able to get over the defeat they suffered at the hands of the Cuban people at the Bay of Pigs, so many years ago.

How can he label a leader like Fidel “a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people” when Fidel was hailed by the Cuban people wherever he went and he was loved by millions of people, not just in Cuba but all over the world. A man who was bid farewell by the whole nation when he passed away, with an outpouring of grief and rivers of tears, as well as their promise to continue his work and be loyal to his memory and his legacy.

“Unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights” was what existed in Cuba before 1959, a situation that the Revolution radically changed and which continues to exist in many third world countries, without the most powerful country in the world lifting a finger to do anything to help and change this situation.

Mr. Trump still hasn’t figured out yet that fundamental human rights are respected more here in Cuba than they are in his own country, where the police kill people just because the color of their skin is black, where those who aren’t white, blonde, of Anglosaxon origin, are considered second or third class citizens. Not by the US people, who are also a victim, but by the authorities, which make them worse than any of the dictatorships Latin America has ever had, who were backed by the United States government.

Mr. Trump talks about firing squads as something very serious, as if the death penalty didn’t exist in his own country. In Cuba, nobody has been shot without due process with every legal guarantee, and those who were shot after the Revolution triumphed were torturers, murderers, war criminals who couldn’t cover up their crimes, as they had the plaintiffs standing right in front of them. Even so, many of those who should have been shot only received prison sentences, because of a lack of evidence, or they escaped Cuba and were taken in by the United States and they now form part of this group that Trump says supported him in his presidential campaign.

I have only mentioned one paragraph from the diatribes that Imperialism’s President has written, the same man who couldn’t think of anything else to do but throw out rolls of toilet paper when the Puerto Rican people had been hit by a mighty hurricane, as a symbol of the only aid this suffering people were going to receive. This in a country which was converted into a US colony in 1898 and has been denied its right to freedom ever since. That is real brutal oppression. In Cuba, we enjoy full freedom and if you doubt this, come and see it with your own eyes like Barack Obama did.