Frank Zimmerman and the book that dissects the myths and falsehoods of Cuban communism
Nuevo
Agregar La Derecha Diario en
Compartir:
By Vicente Echerri for La Derecha Diario.
From the beginning, the Cuban Revolution, which has just turned 67 years old, was a failed endeavor that managed to turn one of the most prosperous countries in the Americas into an authentic showcase of poverty and civic degradation, which always accompany the so-called "real socialism": a formula for disaster.
Nevertheless, the enthusiasm sparked by the seizure of power by some unconventional politicians—young, unkempt, disrespectful of conventions, and enemies of consecrated traditions—began to manufacture, in more than half the world, a mythology that exalted and magnified the existence and actions of a regime that, from the beginning, was a stark tyranny for the people of Cuba and the unstoppable engine of their ruin.
This disparity—between reality and propaganda—stemmed from an act of faith: the global "progressive" movement—which did not yet recognize itself by that name—, the communists, who were beginning to face the unmasking of Stalinism, found a second wind in that so-called "socialism with a human face" that had emerged in the Caribbean.
The typical arbitrariness of despotism and the economic collapse that accompanied the Castro state from the beginning managed to hide behind an advertising curtain that highlighted and publicized some "achievements" that found a sounding board among anti-democrats and anti-capitalists everywhere, especially in Latin America, where the Cuban Revolution was proposed as the panacea for endemic ills.
El dictador comunista Fidel Castro.
The result was, for many years, a monstrous dichotomy between the reality that the Cuban people lived and suffered and the discourse that the propagandists of Castroism continued to spread in order to deceive so many people who defended the survival of a system that they believed had managed to build a more just society at the gates of imperialism, while rejecting the testimony of the victims. We Cubans who denounced the gigantic fraud that had perverted and shackled our country were considered hateful spoilsports.
Throughout all this time there was no shortage of denunciations—books, films, interviews, etc.—of the regime that overwhelmed Cubans and that its enthusiastic apologists defended, but, curiously, there was a noticeable absence of a synthetic, forceful text that would set out without convolutions the myths of Cuban communism and dismantle them with surgical precision.
That role has been fulfilled by 12 mitos del castrismo by Frank Zimmerman, who, born in 1957, was a very small child when the political phenomenon that he dissects took over power in Cuba.
Zimmerman has managed—as never before in the history of our already long exile—to condense into a relatively brief book all the truisms of Castroist propaganda and demolish them with impeccable data and logic: from the situation of pre-revolutionary Cuba, which they have sold as a backward country and a colony of the United States, to the successes in the fields of education and health, passing through the ideological and moral profile of the revolutionary leaders—Castro, Che Guevara—who, far from being redeemers of the poor or defenders of the oppressed, were in reality discontented offspring of the bourgeoisie, intoxicated by poorly digested readings, thirsty for prominence, and brimming with ineptitude.
Cuba.
The Cuban Revolution was an experiment by a gang of brutes who, in pursuit of a harebrained imperialist dream, sacrificed the life and the happiness of a noble and credulous people, while at the same time intoxicating many other societies with a spurious ideology, particularly in Latin America.
We must give thanks to Frank Zimmerman for this demystifying endeavor that doesn't arrive too late when, in the midst of the most obvious failure, the Cuban Revolution still finds devotees and defenders.
This book, an illuminating breviary of a fraud and a tragedy, must be on every politician's desk and within reach of all thinking men and women—analysts, commentators, ideologues—, without distinction of parties and banners, when the moment seems to be approaching to render a definitive judgment on one of the great scams of contemporary history.
