I like nothing less than starting our podcast with what is happening across the street, but today everything revolves around something that cannot be underestimated due to the weight it has in international politics. And by the sign it bears. We are talking, of course, about the mid-term elections, held this Tuesday in the United States, to elect 36 governors and renew the House and a third of the Senate. At the level of the Union, the red tide so announced by the Republicans, which did take place in nearby Florida, the base of the political forces that support the Cuban counterrevolutionary industry, remained wishful thinking.
Analyzing the meaning of the day, Reinier Duardo pointed to the re-election of Governor Ron DeSantis, Senator Marco Rubio and Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, as signs that a deepening of hate speech and tightening of the blockade is coming.
There, Trump’s legacy remains particularly alive, while a woman like Nancy Pelosi – who welcomed Juan Guaidó and enthusiastically applauded him in Congress – is accused of being a leftist and they try to kill her. This confirms what has been said more than once from Cuba: it is up to us to break the blockade, because the newly elected officials and their lobbyists will do everything to make it worse. The neighbor’s policy continues to steer the extreme right, at least in its area closest to Cuba.
Bárbara Betancourt agrees with this criterion, who points to the signs of the show prior to the moment of the vote, feverish by the euphoria of the haters, the threatening speech against those who dissent and the call to support DeSantis, one of the most ineffective politicians in the United States. States, governor of a failed state, as proven during the pandemic and more recently before, during and after Hurricane Ian. Worse yet: DeSantis is a presidential candidate, as Trump was before he became president, and many believed that it would be impossible. It is dramatically true and it is not good for anyone, except for his followers who already know what size of hate they wear.
In the midst of this republican euphoria, AméricaTV broadcasts a piece of news that the presenters describe as unusual: a Cuban steals a fishing boat from his work to go to Cuba, because “he is tired of living in the United States…”. Stranded in North American waters, he asks for help and they have arrested him.
Although emigration in the opposite direction is common, there are not so few who, after having emigrated, cannot bear to live in the United States and try to return as best they can. The detail of interest is that he steals the boat. Why? Suppose he didn’t have the money to pay for a ticket, or perhaps he thought that if the Miami media praises those who steal ships in Cuba, they will get equal treatment for their journey.
What is really known about the last person who stole a small plane to leave Cuba is that he must be repatriated and that the plane will be returned. Cuba has denounced many times over the years what happens when emigration is stimulated with economic suffocation measures and legal roads become more expensive or closed. Just another reason to thoroughly reassess the immigration issue and the policies that have fueled these practices for so long.
In conclusion, it is very important that the agreements are resumed and the United States does its part. Like Cuba.
(By: Arleen Rodríguez Derivet/Cubadebate)