The wall of Havana

The Berlin Wall, built by the Soviet Union to divide Germany into two parts, was 146 kilometers long, of which 45 kilometers were in Berlin. The hulk was made on August 9, 1961 and collapsed on November 9, 1989; an ignominious existence of 28 years.

Invited by the Frederich Neuman Foundation, I had the opportunity to see that three-meter-high wall. I saw barbed wire, ditches, mined land, and guardhouses with powerful floodlights that lit up the night when alarms sounded by daring escapists.

Families were thus divided, imprisoned, and those who dared to jump the wall were imprisoned or killed by security guards. Some, however, escaped through 70 tunnels and even a group made it through a hot air balloon.

But what that gray brick and cement wall could not prevent, nor could the cancer agents, was to frustrate the democratic yearning of thousands of human beings held captive by the communist dictatorship, who wanted to live in democracy and with economic well-being.

After 28 years, on November 9, 1989, a year after Gorbachev promoted Perestroika, relaxing suffocating government control over the economy, and Glasnost, which granted freedoms to the population, including the right to criticize and strike, the wall was demolished by the Berliners themselves with blows from ropes, hammers and shovels. And also, in parallel, in 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved, fragmenting into fifteen sovereign states. At the same time, Moscow’s satellites, Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Albania, Czechoslovakia and the sarcastically named German Democratic Republic, fell one by one like houses of cards.

Thus ended a nightmare that began with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which for more than 70 years only produced death, desolation and poverty.

Our hemisphere has what we could call the Havana wall, 62 years old, more than twice as long as the Berlin wall, but it is not built in the form of a wall but through a sophisticated political system from which they have emigrated, according to the UN , one million 700 thousand people, who represent almost 15% of the island population. Cuba is the heart and brain that promotes and protects totalitarianism in the region. From Havana they promote ideas, advertising tactics, intelligence and counterintelligence services that serve to perpetuate in power Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or the tyrant Ortega in Nicaragua.

Also, in 1990, the creation of the São Paulo Forum arose from Havana, after CELAC and the People’s Summit. Cuba assembles leftist movements and candidacies in the region, designing strategies to compact rulers of that tendency or fools like the Mexican López Obrador and the Argentine Fernández, who have in common a romantic memory of Fidel Castro and a visceral anti-American position, which are enemies of the free market and partners of extra-continental totalitarian regimes, such as Iran, China and Russia.

The Island is poor in economic resources and miserly in freedoms, but abundantly rich in ideas that spread in the region, as they did in the 1960s by promoting guerrilla warfare on the continent. In short, as long as Havana continues to lead Latin America politically, totalitarianism will continue to spread.