Cuba’s Bobby Sands

09/08/2010

Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.

Nobody goes to Belfast for the weather.

When I had the good fortune to get there a few years back with my sister and her husband, we all acknowledged the morbid curiosity that brought us to Northern Ireland’s volatile capital. That conspicuous hatred and division, which we were led to believe disappeared after American envoy George Mitchell helped broker the Good Friday Agreement, was manifest everywhere.

That we equate a lack of media coverage with improvement is nothing new; and nowhere is this currently greater evidenced than in Haiti. Even apolitical Haitians are apparently singing Wyclef songs on the streets of Port-Au-Prince in anticipation, not of the prodigal son rescuing them from the ineffective government of René Préval, but of refocusing our ephemeral attention span on their plight in a way sometimes only celebrity can; they’ve learned the hard way that our well-intentioned promises are often forgotten when the cameras shut off.

Returning for a moment to Belfast—of the many memories still fresh in my mind, the mural of Bobby Sands remains one of the most poignant—not as a piece of art, but because his now widely cited words seemed to mean more there in the environment in which they were inspired. Michael Fassbender’s portrayal in Steve McQueen’s Hunger has since not only made seeing the mural less essential, but added the gory details and removed any romantic notion of what it’s actually like to starve yourself to death.

But while Bobby Sands has been immortalized through art, Orlando Zapata has yet to become a household name like his Irish predecessor. In my opinion, Zapata’s death in February got very little attention. Aside from brief mentions in the mainstream media, there was hardly any polemic aside from the always vocal Cuban Diaspora and—obviously—Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Of course it was universally denounced, but politicians everywhere will only go as far their constituents demand, and outside of Florida those demands appeared to be few and far between.

There are some who argue the international pressure Zapata’s death inspired directly resulted in the release of other political prisoners—notably those from the Group of 75 unjustly imprisoned in 2003; that argument, though, as Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out in his July 25 column in El País—is quite the spin.

Should we really be celebrating as progress the release of men whose crimes were signing petitions and owning typewriters?

I do think Llosa went a bit far in describing President Zapatero’s abandonment of the E.U. Common Position on Cuba as a political ruse to remind their Spanish supporters the PSOE is more than just nominally socialist, but at the same time, playing good cop with the Castro brothers right now is analogous to pardoning a bank robber who gives back some of the stolen money.

It’s a moot point that Zapata sacrificed his life for his fellow prisoners, but I can’t imagine he’d see increased releases as anything more than an extremely minor victory, or as the leader of Havana’s Damas de Blanco (White Ladies) (Cuba’s version of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) Laura Pollán put it, ‘a little light’.

We all know how eagerly Fidel’s death is anticipated, and of the 638 Ways to Kill Castro, many are still incredulous it could be natural causes that finally do him in. Some see the day that happens as the day Cuba will finally stop seeing Batista era cacharros on its roads; though if his return to the National Assembly this week is any indication, that day might not be as soon as previously thought.

Nonetheless, whenever that inevitable event does occur, would it not be wiser to be in the position to definitively put Cuban communism out of its misery and release the long-repressed Cuban ingenuity ready to explode for their and the world’s benefit? Or do we appease a dying regime, reward their half-hearted benevolence and allow Zapata to become the next Pedro Luis Boitel?—a man perhaps more deserving of the title of Cuba’s Bobby Sands. Remembered by some, but forgotten by most.