Disapproving of Trump is not sympathizing with the Democrats or subscribing to the ’Communist Manifesto’, but rather hating a style of doing politics
By Xavier Carbonell (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – Who can forget the tedious English classes in high school, when the teacher asked for a paragraph – a composition, she would say, as if one were Mozart – that listed pleasures and annoyances, hobbies and chores, likes and dislikes. Writing a column about Trump feels like that. An exam, a strange duty, before a world that has accepted reasoning with the viscera (the guts, teacher!) and not with the brain. I have thought a lot, so much, about him. Since the first day and with both hemispheres. But what is coming has a lot to do with the stomach.
I don’t like Trump, I don’t like the fanaticism of Cubans for Trump, I don’t like that he is in the news every day, it’s not healthy, I don’t like the politics of harassment and corporate aggression, I hate the way he manages – like a farm, like Birán [the Castro family estate] – what for us was the country of freedom. I don’t think he understands what a democracy is. I don’t think he understands it or knows how to preserve it. In that he is like us.
Disapproving of Trump is not sympathizing with the Democrats or subscribing to the Communist Manifesto. Disapproving of Trump is hating a style of doing politics that has already had – please remember – four years to show what it could and could not do. Trump, the man who today makes whispered deals with Putin and Maduro, is “the hero who will save the Trocha”? What did Trump do for us in his first term? What is his duty against that insignificant dictatorship, Olympically ignored by 13 administrations, from Eisenhower to Biden? What commits him? The Florida vote? Please.
To see a Cuban rave about him, celebrate his victory, throw a pathetic little party, a pathetic little cake with blue, white and red meringue, is to re-enact that orgasmic militancy that he once felt for Fidel Castro. Another “The Man”? Another “The Horse”? Another “My Commander”? Again “This is your house, Fidel”? No, thank you, whoever it is. A politician is an administrator, not a messiah.
I arrived in Europe without knowing what I was going to eat for the next month. I was assigned a number. I know what it is like to be a number or an illegible card, and I am not remotely alone. This country welcomed me, life made its way through mountains of bureaucracy, regulations, paperwork and uncertainty. What kind of human being would I be if I approved – or worse, if I voted! – for a policy that gives the green light to the hunt for migrants, hundreds of them my fellow citizens.
No, Biden’s immigration policies have not solved anything, but that does not justify thousands, perhaps millions of people living in total uncertainty since January 20. Not uncertainty, but fear. That is not the America we believed in. That is not freedom.
But Cubans are never afraid. Cubans, who do not live in a country but in a bubble of exceptionality, do not take it personally. Trump, my friend, the people are with you. One of the lowest hours of Cuban exile was traveling to Washington, to the doors of the White House, and asking for absolutely everything – some already saw themselves in a B-1 Lancer dropping bombs on Point Zero, with the Ride of the Valkyries in the background – except clemency for migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti, three countries as screwed as we are, perhaps more so. And the Afghans? And the Ukrainians? And the others?
Many pro-Trump friends, who are now beginning to moderate their enthusiasm, have told me: “I never imagined it would turn out like this.” I reply that there was nothing to imagine, because Trump may be a cruel, authoritarian guy and a compulsive liar in almost everything, but that when it came to migrants he was more transparent and sincere than the Virgin Mary. You like Trump, but he doesn’t like you.
I don’t like the fact that any Cuban who expresses the slightest displeasure with Trump – which ultimately is not just hating that ugly, orange-haired old man, but the values he proposes – is met by a school of patriotic piranhas on social media. One leaves Cuba to speak, think and defend whatever one wants. Be a Trumpist, I respect that right. But cancelling and censoring, putting all the nuances in the same bag, simplifying, insulting, defaming, those are Villa Marista tactics that we have assimilated by dint of suffering them.
Trump will not help us build a country. Nobody is going to fix it for us or gift it to us. For Trump, there is only one country, and I am not even sure it is the United States. The politicians who accompany him, whom the press calls Cuban-Americans, are Americans even if they have Latin surnames. They are concerned about a nation, their own, not that of their parents, and with good reason. Cuba – Kiuba – is a word that must sound very exotic in Washington.
I cannot speak about the end of aid to the independent Cuban press, because I have run out of space. To understand the impact of this news, one only has to take a look at the happiness that is felt in Cubadebate, Granma, the Party and the Foreign Ministry.
Well, Donnie, we’re done (I’ll leave Musk for another day). These are my dislikes, with zero likes because I don’t have Facebook or X. Brain and stomach and an arsenal of patience for the future. I feel free, freer than ever, as every Cuban migrant should feel, and the rest is literature. “Let Trump cook,” one wrote recently. Let him cook, the Kingdom is his. But with what ingredients, with whose sweat, at the cost of what values, with what allies, the Cubans? Like in Woody Allen’s joke, I no longer dare to belong to any club where there are people from my country.
At the end of this tunnel of tension that is about to become a roller coaster, we are ants trying to live our lives in the age of Trump, extras in an episode of House of Cards or Succession, a poorly drawn drawing in the background of the comic strip. Gray and forgettable people. But tell me, at the end of the day, isn’t that a little comforting?
Translated by Translating Cuba.
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