Is honking enough? Kansas City, Wichita, US must stand up, step for our Cuban friends
Cubans in this region are 1,300 miles from their dear native land. But they can still feel the aching desire for freedom, and the torment that has boiled over the past week into unprecedented protest.
What’s more, they feel this time is different than any uprising in the 62 years of Fidel Castro’s disreputable “revolution.”
“I am convinced that the protests will continue until Cuba is free,” says Leonardo Cabrera, the 59-year-old pastor of Jesus Cristo El Buen Pastor Church in northeast Kansas City, and one of many rallying for Cuba at the Country Club Plaza these past few days.
Why is he convinced? “Because I’m Cuban. I know the desire for freedom that country has. Even though thousands of innocent Cuban men and women have been executed in Cuban prisons, they have never been able to take away that thirst for freedom.”
He knows whereof he speaks. The man of God was imprisoned a dizzying 10 times by the Castro regime, the final time for four years, until his family was forced into exile in 1998.
Kansas state Rep. Susan Estes, Republican of Wichita, whose father is Havana-born, also is heartened as never before by the freedom protests. “It’s unlike anything that’s happened since the revolution,” she says.
Still, she adds ominously, “The Cuban people are begging for help. It’s a one-sided fight. You have people who are carrying bats and rocks facing down guns. There is no way for them to resist and overthrow their government.”
Indeed, Cabrera’s certitude in the protesters’ staying power is both encouraging and frightening. Without foreign intervention, the Cuban people’s fight for freedom is a looming humanitarian disaster off Florida’s coast. Even more so than the daily routine, which has seen the Cuban people imprisoned for six decades and more than 100,000 of their lives lost in desperate watery attempts to escape.
“This is something the United States needs to be conscious of,” Cabrera told me through his interpreting daughter Gresia, “that just 90 miles south of this country, there will be a bloodbath if they do not intervene.”
Why is this happening now? Some want to blame a virus, or the U.S. economic embargo. Don’t buy it, Cuban-Americans here tell me.
“It’s not the embargo. It’s the dictatorship,” says Marisel Walston of Lenexa, who came to the U.S. in 1979 at the age of 14. Cuba is free to trade elsewhere, and can buy food and medicine from the U.S., she notes. The problem is, while the island is rich in natural resources and resourceful people, the bumbling, stifling communist government can’t produce squat to trade with and can’t pay for what it buys.
Moreover, Walston says, “The embargo is not denying them basic human rights. It’s not denying them the right to express themselves. It’s not denying them the right to religious freedom. It’s not the embargo’s fault, it’s the dictatorship’s fault. It’s the government that mistreats and jails and kills its own people.”
COVID-19 made conditions caused by Fidel Castro worse
As for COVID-19, it is more catalyst than cause. Just as it does in people, the virus exacerbates preexisting conditions in countries. Nowhere are conditions more itching to be exacerbated than in Castro’s Cuba.
And make no mistake: It is still his Cuba — nearly five years after his death, it’s the same brutal regime you’ve come to know and loathe, only under new management. Not to be outdone by the late Castro’s clownish coercion, his successors in 2018 issued Decree 349, which required all artistic expression to be preapproved on high. That led to the “San Isidro” protest movement, and a broad defiance of government expectations that artists never fail to sing the revolution’s praises.
“The blame for this is squarely on the shoulders of the socialist government,” says Estes.
But if blame for this rebellion is the regime’s, much of the credit goes to the internet — which was rolled out in earnest in Cuba as recently as 2018, but which has exposed the younger generation to novel notions of artistic and political freedom. It has also empowered Cubans to know about protests in real time, which has rarely been the case before.
How should the free world respond? Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has encouraged American internet providers to try to bypass Cuba’s internet shutdown, and has asked President Joe Biden to help them do so.
“This is the moment that the United States puts its name on high in this hemisphere,” Cabrera says. “Because, if they let this moment pass, history will remember the president who ignored the suffering and pain of a people practically off the coast of the U.S. that, for 62 years, has been massacred.”
America’s artists and performers could also show common cause with their counterparts and shine a light on their repression in Cuba.
There is a history of helping Cuba in this region, certainly. Kansas City is a resettlement city for refugees, and Wichita churches were participants in “Operation Peter Pan,” taking in unaccompanied minors from Cuba in 1960-62 to protect them from communist indoctrination. Former Wichita mayor Carlos Mayans was actually one of those children.
The mood of the ralliers at the Country Club Plaza Wednesday evening was much more jubilant than that of their besieged compatriots in Cuba. But the aim is the same: freedom. And while appearing festive, and buoyed by the protests back home and by the many Kansas City motorists honking their support, Cuban-Americans here are of heavy heart.
“I know that a lot of these people that are fighting right now probably are going to end up dead or in jail,” Walston says.
People who have freedom love it, and no one clutches freedom like an American. Standing up for freedom in Cuba shouldn’t be the question, then. It’s how, and how much.
The honking must only be a start.
This story was originally published July 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Is honking enough? Kansas City, Wichita, US must stand up, step for our Cuban friends."
