When a nascent totalitarian communist-fascist regime lifts up its head, such as the one in Chávez’s Venezuela, the one thing one should never do, the Cuban-American Manuel Cruz emphatically suggests in Pandemic of Lies: The Exile, is to abandon the country:
“Not really,” I grinned, “but if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll finish the sentence: we don’t want to have another Operation Peter Pan occur here in Banador. That would be a terrible thing. It’s good for the Banadorian people to get angry at their government, but it’s bad for them to start feeling resigned. And it’s terrible, even disastrous, if they start thinking about leaving the country and becoming political exiles somewhere. You’ve got to stay here and fight,” I said emphatically, returning unavoidably to the “you” again. “Don’t make the mistake my parents’ generation committed when they saw in emigrating to the United States and other free countries the solution to their problem and that of Cuba. It didn’t work. It didn’t work at all. It was catastrophic, tragic. Look at how many years the Castro brothers have remained in power. They’ve set records in that department, haven’t they? That’s because all the dissidents and thinking people and entrepreneurs left the island, with the mindset that the last to leave should turn out the light in case the Castro brothers forgot to. So we’ve got to stay,” I exhorted, returning to the “we”. “Yes to staying on our turf. Yes to an all-out War against the new Totalitarian Beast that has been hatched in Banador and is preparing its merciless assault, with the help of his Communist Big Brothers, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, on the democratic institutions of this country and its most fundamental liberties. And a definite and emphatic NO to going into exile. The battle has to be waged from the trenches inside Banador, not from Brickell Avenue in Miami.”
“Not really,” I grinned, “but if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll finish the sentence: we don’t want to have another Operation Peter Pan occur here in Banador. That would be a terrible thing. It’s good for the Banadorian people to get angry at their government, but it’s bad for them to start feeling resigned. And it’s terrible, even disastrous, if they start thinking about leaving the country and becoming political exiles somewhere. You’ve got to stay here and fight,” I said emphatically, returning unavoidably to the “you” again. “Don’t make the mistake my parents’ generation committed when they saw in emigrating to the United States and other free countries the solution to their problem and that of Cuba. It didn’t work. It didn’t work at all. It was catastrophic, tragic. Look at how many years the Castro brothers have remained in power. They’ve set records in that department, haven’t they? That’s because all the dissidents and thinking people and entrepreneurs left the island, with the mindset that the last to leave should turn out the light in case the Castro brothers forgot to. So we’ve got to stay,” I exhorted, returning to the “we”. “Yes to staying on our turf. Yes to an all-out War against the new Totalitarian Beast that has been hatched in Banador and is preparing its merciless assault, with the help of his Communist Big Brothers, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, on the democratic institutions of this country and its most fundamental liberties. And a definite and emphatic NO to going into exile. The battle has to be waged from the trenches inside Banador, not from Brickell Avenue in Miami.”
No comments:
Post a Comment