What's That Sound?

Listen carefully. You can almost hear it, that sound of bubbles rising. A European diplomat weeks ago described the mood of the Cuban people as being like a pot about to boil: there's a bubble here and a bubble there 'til it reaches the tipping point. Now I'm not anywhere near celebrating, but just reading through the reports coming from Cuba tonight was eye-opening.

Report after report features a title that begins with "Denunciation from." And the tone is about the harshest I have seen. Oswaldo Yanez, one of my favorite independent journalists- the one who dates his dispatches in the year of the imminent liberation of Cuba- was particularly cutting. In response to the latest desperate ploy on the part of the slavemasters, that the internet is restricted because of the American embargo, he writes-

...the length of the hypocrisy is directly proportional to the thousands of miles of submerged cable that Ramirito has ordered to connect the archipelago with Venezuela, a project that could be left unfinished before the road of no return that the red gorilla has taken since the loss of the referendum.

Not that it would matter anyway, he argues, as they are inagurating a new cable and ordinary Cubans, as usual, will have no access.

He reserves some of his harshest criticism for the international community:

The castristas continue to dupe the international community, maintaining the posture that they respect human rights and that there will shortly be changes; they have already fooled the Vatican and the representative of the European Union. I in my innocence thought that it would take more that a turn around the park to convince the Belgian diplomat, but again I was mistaken. For his emminence, a televised mass and empty promises sufficed.

The poor fellow cannot understand why the peregrinations of the "Bolivarian lunatic" get more media coverage than the farcial hearing and unjust imprisonment of Juan Bermúdez Toranzo. He's heard that we have been disheartened by recent events but urges that now more than ever our voices are needed.

Before the whole world, we should all clamor for the release of the unjustly jailed; we should forcefully declare that it is enough of tyranny, call out with a single voice that the change can no longer be stopped-together and supporting each other in the labor of liberating our patria.


May God watch over him and all the facing down the engines of repression and crying "Basta Ya!"

Cambio
(The article in Spanish here. There are other articles, equally mordant, some coming from veterans of the "Black Spring" here. Bad translations mine.)