Guillen and Cubans exercise free speech
HAVANA — Shortly before Major League Baseball manager Ozzie Guillen was banished for five games for professing to admire Fidel Castro’s survival skills, I chanced upon a meeting in the capital of this communist country where free speech exacted no such penalty.
It was a gathering of Cuban intellectuals — writers, historians, social activists, journalists, educators and Communist Party functionaries — who met at the National Union of Writers and Artists to discuss racial issues. The topics ranged from the role of hiphop music in today’s Cuba to a commemoration of the 1912 massacre of thousands of blacks by Cuban government troops. And while there was a lot of agreement among those who crowded into the small meeting room, there was a surprising amount of disagreement — the kind of dissent that critics say doesn’t go unpunished in Cuba.
Guillen, the newly minted manager of the Miami Marlins, a team that just moved into a $515 million stadium that is largely financed by South Florida taxpayers, was punished for telling Time magazine: “I love Fidel Castro. . . . I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that mother------ is still here.”
Outrage at Guillen
Though that seems hardly the kind of praise that would get the Venezuelan-born Guillen a dinner invitation from the 85-year-old Castro, it set off calls for his head in Miami. Despite the chastened manager’s public apology, protesters demanded he be fired and threatened to boycott the team, if he wasn’t dismissed.
Sure, protesters have a First Amendment right to demand that Guillen be punished for exercising his right to free speech. Our constitutional guarantee sometimes extends to the outer limits of good sense. But for those who clamor for Cuba’s return to democracy, attacking one of our government system’s basic underpinnings is not just ironic, it’s instructive.
Cold War sentiment
South Floridians who insist on maintaining Cold War tensions with Cuba tolerate democratic freedoms only when they don’t run counter to their obsessive hatred for Castro, who led the Caribbean Island nation for 49 years until poor health forced him to retire in 2008. They decry anyone who suggests the U.S. should afford Cuba’s communist regime the same diplomatic recognition and economic engagement it has given the communist governments of Vietnam and China.
Of course, any visitor to Cuba will quickly see that it has its own paranoia — a tendency to see a plot to topple the revolution that brought Castro to power in 1959 behind every call for political and economic reform. But increasingly, Cuba is showing greater tolerance for openness and a willingness to change, albeit slowly. That was apparent in both the frankness of the discussion among participants of the meeting on race —and by the presence of professor Esteban Morales.
Morales was expelled from Cuba’s Communist Party in 2010, a defrocking that is tantamount to internal exile, after he wrote two articles arguing that corruption is “much more dangerous” than dissidents within the country. He was reinstated last year without backing away from his criticism.
During a recent interview, Morales told me that Cuba continues to struggle with racism, despite laws against it. He blames this on the actions of individuals, not the government. Even this kind of nuanced acknowledgment of bigotry hasn’t always been tolerated in Cuba. But the trend here is toward more freedom of speech and a movement away from the kind of intolerance that got Guillen suspended.