Freedom except where void

From the official website of Reporters sans frontières, English version:

Reporters Without Borders learned last night that UNESCO has withdrawn its patronage for today’s [March 12] Online Free Expression Day. We were notified of the decision by the director of its Freedom of Expression, Democracy and Peace Division. Defending the move, UNESCO said it gave its patronage for the “principle of this day” but could not support the various demonstrations organised to mark it.

The demonstrations were by and large protests against censorship. There are a number of countries where you can't speak or write against the government or the dominant religion (sometimes those two are one and the same), or else you run the risk of being harassed and having your website or blog or radio station or newsletter shut down, of losing your job, or worse — being punished by legal or illegal means, with jail or a beating or death. The list includes Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

I seriously doubt UNESCO is concerned by the possible reactions of Cuba, Zimbabwe, Tunisia or Burma to RWB's efforts to denounce their record of press freedom violations. This is just a cowardly surrender into self-censorship. This is why so many people think the UN and its agencies are useless bureaucracies.

It's understandable, maybe: China is a communist dictatorship, the most populated country in the world, and it has nuclear weapons; Saudi Arabia is a theocratic dictatorship with the world's largest reserves of oil, and is always working at producing fanatic terrorists in case they're needed anywhere. Iran, about the same, only it's ruled by an anti-American Holocaust denier of a president instead of a pro-American decadent monarchy. And Egypt you can't bother because they keep the other Arab countries in check. But all that aside, what's UNESCO's "Freedom of Expression, Democracy and Peace Division" for, exactly? What are they doing about those nice abstractions?

People we should be free of by now

Ah. Just when we Latin Americans thought we had shaken off these kinds of governments for good, up pops Mad Hugo, and not content with subjecting us all to his rambling anti-imperialist speeches, he's now threatening to bring war back to our subcontinent.

It just doesn't get more magic-realist than this. A big faraway country run by a religious lunatic under the command of a huge military-industrial complex orders a small country, half-owned by drug-trafficking terrorists and the other half devoted to coffee and banana plantations, to serve as proxy on its War on Drugs and Terror and Marxism, and said small country sends people into another country to kill the terrorist negotiator while he's at work, possibly about to agree on the release of long-held prisoners, at which a fourth, neighbouring country, full of oil reserves and run by a populist quasi-dictator with a fetish for red shirts, feels threatened, cuts diplomatic ties, and sends ten battalions to the border.

And our intrepid Presidenta, who is very well-spoken and tries to project an image of herself as a true stateswoman and always has something to say, says nothing about the madman in the red shirt.

Mind you, this is not a matter of right or left. Latin America has had its internal struggles, even full-blown wars, but mostly we've been free of that for a long time. Since Chile, belatedly, rid itself of its murderer-in-chief in the 1990s, no major country in this part of the world has fallen under a dictatorship. Strong-fisted governments, governments where Congress and the judiciary are a joke, governments with almost no accountability, yes — but not dictatorships. It's usually only plain dictators who can plunge a whole country into armed conflict these days.

And more importantly, a consensus has slowly emerged — an agreement among all the larger countries that, whenever continental stability is threatened, everybody will step in to defuse the conflict. Like a family where the big brothers don't let the little ones hurt themselves. But then Hugo came along, a big brother on his own right, and started behaving half like a spoiled brat, half like a grown-up on drugs. An intervention is in order, perhaps?

Fidel resigns

The news today is, of course, Fidel Castro's resignation, or rather his announcement that he won't seek to retake the power he left in his brother's hands when he got ill two years ago. The headlines are full of Cuba, as are the TV broadcasts.

It's only 8:13 AM and I'm already sick of all the speculation. I've just read some idealized Marxist version of Fidel's ethics and values — "the true human being does not ask on which side life is better, but on which side duty lies" — from a guy who seems to forget that such lovely values lose their meaning if they're imposed on the people by a dictator, no matter how picturesque or how romantic his ideas.

During breakfast I heard a top U.S. government official at CNN explaining that Fidel's evil remains even if he's not in power anymore, so there's no reason to lift the blockade on Cuba, which is intended to deny resources to its Communist regime. With a straight face this guy explained that the Cuban administration is evil because it doesn't let people choose their own authorities and puts people in jail if they don't agree with the government, so it's an enemy of the United States. Hello? China? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? It seems you have to be small and powerless to be a true enemy of the U.S. You can't possibly be a threat to the U.S. if you're the world's largest exporter of oil, if you have the largest population of cheap labourers and the largest market for commodities, or if you have nuclear bombs. No, it takes a tiny island with a third of the population of California and almost no natural resources to be an enemy to the world's only remaining superpower!

Fidel or not, doesn't anybody realize that if the blockade was lifted Cuba would be inundated with useless capitalist gadgets and trinkets, and that the ensuing consumerist fever would wash away the (apparently very dangerous) ideals of the revolution in less than one generation? I mean, even China came to acknowledge private property! The blockade has been doing a favour to Castro for almost 50 years.

The U.S. should take this chance to flaunt its power, lift the blockade and let Fidel and Raúl Castro deal with it during this, their weakest moment. But doing it would be political suicide. Let's see what happens after the elections...