CROSSOVER

I will humbly suggest to Hugo Landa, director of Cubanet (one of the few "initiatives" on Cuba where the use of tax payer money seems to have a meaning) to try and create an English version of his medium. I can't define the actual outreach of this daily digital publication, but at least I see it coming every weekday and it usually covers a wide range of issues that affect the lives of the average Cuban people. Joe and Jane should definitely have access to that information. My native island simply cannot continue to be a ghetto theme nor the mere obsession of a shrinking and aging segment in  our community.

In today's issue there was an article that I found enlightening in more ways than one as well as a word that has always come across to me as euphemistic; the former was about a slave uprising in the 19th century presumably triggered by the love between Carlota and Fermina, two slave women. But it was not the usually "censored" story that surprised me since we all tend to observe history through our hindsight twenty/twenty vision, but the fact that in those days reforms were introduced in order to treat the slaves in a more "humane" way with the real objective of avoiding their push towards "abolition". 

Some claim history repeats itself; for the skeptics it is first tragedy and then comedy; in the case of Cuba I can't help noticing how we return to the 19th century when so many supporters of a new approach to our relations with the Havana Junta claim to have witnessed improvements in that tiny nation; would this be the grotesque contemporary version of the more "humane" treatment after Carlota and Fermina were butchered?. 

The latter was not any particular article or topic, but the abuse of the word "project"; thus, Diaz Canel, the would be heir apparent to the lower throne (that of the presidency of Council of State of the National Assembly; i.e. the regime's version of a president), being the post of First Secretary of the Communist Party the ONLY position of power, made a speech in which he mentions "our revolutionary project"; then as I kept reading other articles I saw the same word this time describing an opposition initiative against the regime; it suddenly dawned on me that the elite that rules the nation has long ago imposed their own semantics and that one of the first steps any opposition movement must take is to put forth a new and more affable narrative, a less dense rhetoric, a more agile semantics; we can't use words from the time of the transistor radio in the age of binary language; how can one translate celluloid into digital imagery?.

During the last two years, long before anyone imagined the Democrats could lose the White House, I have called for a revision of the so called "support to the efforts for democracy in Cuba"; actually, not to abandon the Cuban people, on the contrary, to make sure that EVERY penny we spend is aimed at easing the hardships endured by the populace and eventually broadens their horizon. I, by default, give any Cuban who opposes the current situation the benefit of the doubt. But it is time to use our money effectively and do away with the pinata that some make on our dime. While I admire and praise all those who really work for the Cuban people; as it is the case, among others, of many individuals of faith, I'm drafting a letter to the Trump administration requesting, to use his own words: a better deal, more tangible resorts for our money so that the word project ceases to be a synonym of political panhandling.