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.
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.
