With or Without the Organization of American States (OAS)

With or Without the Organization of American States (OAS) / Orlando Luis
Pardo Lazo
Posted on March 23, 2014

As a child in Havana, more than a decade after Cuba had been expelled
from the Organization of American States (OAS)—for placing itself within
the Soviet Iron Curtain and constituting a danger to the region's
democracies—we were still forced to chant at school that slogan with no
expiration date: "With or without OAS, we will win the fight."

As kids we had no idea what "OAS" might mean. We imagined it as the
imperialist bald eagle that frightened us in so many children's songs of
that era.

But our childish innocence wasn't important, as long as we never flagged
in our discipline as "Moncada pioneers": that is, children capable of
assaulting the Moncada barracks and dying fighting at dawn, disguised in
the uniforms of those soldiers who were taken by surprise in Carnival
season, as Fidel Castro did in the putsch of Sunday, 26 July 1953.

All that mattered then was to show and demonstrate our patriotic
devotion in the classroom, shouting this slogan until the veins in our
necks ached. We had no idea what "living in chains is to live in
dishonor and ignominy" meant, but we just sang that line in our National
Anthem with grim theatricality at every morning assembly.

It seems that the slogan of the Cuban Communists remains strongly in
force. The government in Havana boasts it will never return to the OAS,
and promotes parallel organizations—like the Community of Latin American
and Caribbean States—to diminish the prestige and power of the OAS. And
to top it off, Cuba controls, through a headless Venezuela, the
geopolitical interests and economic dependence of the region, given that
many Latin American ambassadors appearing in front of the OAS are
nothing more than puppets, supporting or boycotting as a block in
response to neocastroism's strategic interests, be they "Twenty-first
Century Socialism," or "State Capitalism" or "Raulpolitik."

Yesterday, Friday March 21, I spent the day at the OAS in Washington DC.
An odious odyssey of fears and lies was taking place within, in the
opaque style of dictatorships, under the pretext that every people have
exercised their right to decide through majority vote. But, in reality,
we're not talking about 100% sovereign nations. In the best of cases
they are the pawns and parasites of the authoritarian chess game
controlled from behind the Havana Curtain. In the worst of cases, they
are despotic-populist regimes where the caudillo and his clan are
legally "reelected" to the end of time, with no options for the
opposition, and with an infiltration of intelligence forces comparable
only to the criminal Plan Condor from decades back.

Yesterday, María Corina Machado was treated by a miserable majority at
the OAS as a fugitive from supposed Venezuelan justice. Her
companions—the student leader Carlos Vargas, the union leader Iván
Freitas, and Rosa Orozco who became an activist after the assassination
of her daughter Geraldine Moreno—were rudely censored and almost ejected
in handcuffs from the building by OAS Security (not to be confused with
State Security, much less with the murky Cuban G-2, which coerces
without batting an eye—by force of blackmail and terror—Eurodiplomats,
global magnates and Yankee congressmen and women: remember that Castro
spies have been captured inside the Pentagon).

The message could not be more repugnant, with or without the OAS: the
leaders of the area are delivering María Corina Machado into the jaws of
some desperate usurpers between Havana and Caracas, who no longer care
about formal procedures because they know their time is up and that only
slaughter will keep them in their positions in perpetuity, if they
finally manage to impose in Venezuela and the rest of nations that call
themselves "Bolivarian"—that word which, like "revolution," means
nothing and is the cause of all the impunity—the civil cemetery in which
we Cubans have lived since the first year of "our" Revolution.

María Corina Machado has humbly declared that there are millions of
citizen leaders in Venezuela today. True, but this formula is completely
useless to the rage of the repressors, who need to stigmatize, isolate,
disable, imprison, exile, and even execute, as if by accident, a
specific number of leaders. A sacrificial relationship with good
Venezuelans whom she and Leopoldo López now definitely represent. A
limited list that is a limitless list of hope for finally
eradicating—after more than half a century of myths and
bullying—continental Castroism.

Yesterday, the OAS voted for much more than the silence of María Corina
Machado. Yesterday the OAS sentenced her to the murderous loneliness of
nasty socialism, which is the only one that germinates in America.
Yesterday the OAS made itself an accomplice to a crime against morality
which, like the coercive quotas of Venezuelan oil, muddies the miserable
hands and tarnishes the reactionary faces of half a continent.

22 March 2014

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