Sunday, January 13, 2008

the great Mimic

The effect of the April 2nd, 2007 tsunami in the Solomon Island uncovered sunken ships that dated back from WWII. Among these ships were one similar to the one navigated by the late President Kennedy while a young Lieutenant in the Pacific theater of the war. As a collateral of these news and the public fascination with JFK, some old photographs resurfaced in the news media. An old photograph showed a replica of the PT 9 boat similar to the one sailed by Kennedy. This replica was being drawn in a float along a Parade on an unidentified American street.
This picture seemed all too familiar to me, and I recalled the fanfare surrounding the yacht Granma, today housed in a museum in Old Havana. This yacht had brought to Cuba from Mexico a young Castro and 81 of his followers in December of 1956. It occurred to me that the idea of transforming an old boat into a shrine was not original.
Another old American historical item; the Liberty Bell, traveled the American countryside from 1855 to 1915, attempting to foster national unity. In 1947, Fidel Castro a student at Havana University traveled to the eastern part of the country with other opposition leaders to obtain, on loan, the bell that had ushered with its tolls the Cuban Independence War in 1868. In the decade of the 60s, a cruel creation: UMAP imitated the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. In these Cuban camps, unemployed, antisocial elements, homosexuals and others considered in need of rehabilitation worked in the fields from sun up to sun down. The inscription on the entrance of these camps: “ Work will make you free”, taken right out of one of the darkest hour of mankind. The entrance to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz I, in Poland also read: “Arbeit Macht Frei” the German version of the same phrase. Long before that the great mimic had already used another Spanish version of condemned Nazi leader. The phrase History will absolve me, used at the end of his defense in the trial for the armed assault on the Moncada Garrison is similar to the phrase used by Adolf Hitler during his trial for the Beer Hall Putsch in Germany on 1923. Like the fuehrer Castro occupied all the leadership positions as to eliminate any doubt or question regarding his total control.