By Francisco Acevedo
HAVANA TIMES – After the Socialist Camp collapsed in 1991, and with Cuba’s unstoppable economic crisis, the battle to get food is ordinary Cubans’ main priority, and sometimes this bloody battle reveals interesting things along the way.
A social media figure, “Pedro el comunista” (Pedro Miyares Vega), famous for having tattooed none other than our dear Miguel Diaz-Canel and the Cuban Communist Party’s logo (PCC) on his chest, to show his loyalty to the Revolution, dropped one of these pearls recently.
Well, it seems that this man can’t bear the current situation anymore, and amidst quite a few curse words, he asked the leader and his clique to stop improvising because they are starving the Cuban people.
After showing his empty freezer, he added that they won’t give him a job (I don’t know why because they could have at least made sure this man had enough to get by for having got the tattoo), and that his children were sick. This is how Rome pays its traitors, the old saying goes, although this time Rome is the traitor.
The famous tattoo, which the Ministry of Interior (MININT) bragged about on June 6th, its 62nd Anniversary, clearly hasn’t done him much good, and now he’s not only talking about food, but also about repression, the lack of democracy and the domestic blockade. What will he do now with this indelible mark on his chest? By the way, he wasn’t 15 when he got it done, he was already a family man.
A few days later, he said he’d get Canel removed (but not now because he doesn’t have money to do that, according to his own words), but he confessed he was a Fidelista, so it seems he’s in the same boat as Amaury Perez and Edmundo Garcia, who feel betrayed by the current puppet, but they really want everything to stay the same.
With a father and brother on international missions, and some of his family living abroad, who clearly aren’t helping out (maybe because of the tattoo), Miyares said, when he went viral on social media, that during his youth, he suffered a neurological disorder, so he felt indebted to the Cuban Government (for the medical care), but now his stomach was aching.
Let’s remember that “Pedro el comunista” also became famous when Spanish journalist and documentary maker Ana Hurtado visited him, amazed by his act of loyalty. But I don’t know what he’ll say now, nor when the documentary comes out, which she shot here.
Diverting attention, planting fear
In the meantime, Cuban TV on the island is trying to scare people and they are trying to convince us, in the middle of the holiday season, that there will be terrorist attacks in this country based on the story of a person who entered the island with four handguns to try and bring the Government down. It doesn’t matter, the objective was to begin to involve people included in the terrorist list published recently in the Cuban Republic’s Official Gazette. It doesn’t matter if an investigation is underway because this will never be covered by a Cuban media outlet until things have advanced a great deal. Well, at least it has always been this way, maybe they changed strategy.
Maybe it’s an attempt to cover up the investigation of a former US Ambassador who has been accused of spying for the Cuban dictatorship for four decades. As part of his statements, the former US diplomat, Victor Manuel Rocha, explicitly admitted that the Cuban Government orchestrated lots of these kinds of pantomimes, and he gave a clear example of when he bought a boat for 12,000 USD to send a group of Cubans with the desire to change things. However, they were naive in the end, because State Security was waiting for them with open arms to expose them to the world as proof that the island was under attack and thus, they had a carte blanche to continue to buy military equipment instead of ambulances, for example.
It’s a repetitive plan that they put into action every now and again to divert people’s attention, especially when there is danger of a social uprising or an international scandal. Even though it might not seem like it because of just how absurd it is, the strategy does manage to scare some people who want to protest or rebel, planting a seed of doubt.
This week, Cuban TV also showed images from the trial of three Cuban citizens (a man and two women) for “endangering citizen security”, by throwing Molotov cocktails in the People’s Courtroom in Central Havana and putting up posters at the provincial headquarters of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) and other state bodies, receiving sentences between 20-30 years in prison.
But what can you expect from a country where, on International Human Rights Day, it’s the main perpetrators of human rights abuses (the police) who parade?
Going back to agent Rocha, his hearing was postponed until January 12th, with fifteen charges for six crimes, which would bring his maximum penalty to 60 years in prison if he’s found guilty during the trial, which is scheduled for January 29th.
Rocha is a 73-year-old Colombian man who became a US citizen in 1978. He worked for the US Department of State between 1981 and 2003 and held various positions in embassies in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico and Argentina.
He was arrested in Miami on December 1st after confessing his activities to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent, who was undercover as another Cuban spy.
This is another investigation underway, and the postponement of his hearing might be to help him reach some kind of confidentiality agreement in exchange for information, but things aren’t looking great for dictatorship right now. Ah, if anybody was wondering, this case hasn’t been covered on the News on Cuban TV.
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.
