Castro’s Kicks and the Applause of the Sheep

Castro's Kicks and the Applause of the Sheep / Luis Felipe Rojas

Luis Felipe Rojas, 3 May 2016 — They've barely finished giving a slap
before they give another. The insult-spitting machine of the Castro
regime is fired up week after week.

Arbitrary arrests, repudiation rallies, and beatings calibrated from the
offices of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) in every province. This
arsenal of harassment counts on the bleats of the screaming sheep who
don't dare to look at how much grass they have left in the olive-green
kingdom before leaving Cuba.

On the morning of Monday, May 2, it went like this: the Cuban Daniel
Llorente challenged the partisan crowd and called them hypocrites to
their faces. The day before the young black man had screamed
anti-imperialist slogans and this morning he received with cheers the
first cruise ship to come from Miami in 56 years of the walled-off
island. After a discussion in which a fidelista — a party faithful —
made gestures referring to the color of his skin, the police came and
carried him off.

Nobody flinched.

Every year Cuban jurists discuss the squares on every little worksheet
in the sea of bureaucracy, every comma in the most futile paragraphs,
and end up ratifying Fidel Castro as the best exponent of Cuban law. In
the face of the mojitos and ham croquettes they are incapable of
discussion about the most striking legal aberration among those that
cramp their legal degrees: the Law of Pre-Criminal Dangerousness, a tool
used to send thousands of young Cubans to prison for looking cross-eyed
at a police officer.

The Castro press is a black hole into which the history of the country
has fallen. Infamy knocks on its doors and it prefers to write about the
butterfly migration in the Valley of Viñales. The scribblers of the
government libelers have never taken to task an official of the Interior
Order of a prison and they don't want to investigate a beating delivered
by the MINIT's feared Special Troops.

When plainclothes agents shove the young Llorente into a patrol car so
as not to spoil the party of the Adonia cruise ship's arrival in Cuba
this Monday, it was the voice a young woman that was heard above the
national shame shouting, "Throw him overboard." And Havana erupted in
applause.

The country is sliding backwards, for almost sixty years, but the boys
want reggaeton and a fistful of money to pay for wifi, and nobody is
going to distract them.

Source: Castro's Kicks and the Applause of the Sheep / Luis Felipe Rojas
– Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/castros-kicks-and-the-applause-of-the-sheep-luis-felipe-rojas/