After failing in its efforts to destroy the Revolution, the U.S. is resorting to new methods in its battle to change the course Cuba sovereignly chose long ago
On January 13, Cuban television once again denounced a number of actions that are part of the so-called soft coup strategy the U.S. government is attempting to implement in our country.
After having failed for decades in its efforts to destroy the Revolution, the northern neighbor is resorting to new methods in its obsessive fixation on changing the course that Cuba sovereignly chose long ago.
Nonetheless, as President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez recently commented on his Twitter account, this is “an old imported script with new actors.”
The television program referred to an article published on the Cubadebate website by the young media analyst Javier Gómez Sánchez, under the title “The ideologues of the soft coup: Open Society in Cuba and the Counterrevolutionary Articulation.”
The text points out, “The aggressiveness shown during the Donald Trump administration’s term in office, and the positioning of a discourse against the Revolution, by intentionally repulsive media actors, were part of the plan and not an accident apart. A counterrevolution that comes across as irrational and disgusting is being promoted, in contrast to which the neo-counterrevolution can be presented as an alternative, and seen by Cubans as something preferable.”
Within this worn out counterrevolution, with no agenda of its own, violent and without social roots, characters such as Berta Soler and José Daniel Ferrer are known actors. The former is an individual with a long history of provocations backed by money from the Cuban American National Foundation in Florida. The television program notes that the lack of effectiveness of her efforts has taken its toll, and the funding she receives has been reduced. She has even been accused of using the money to cover personal expenses and not to wage an alleged “Cuban cause.”
Ferrer could be defined as a common criminal, with a long police record, promoter of counter-revolutionary actions, a supposed leader fabricated to attract international recognition. The Cuban people will surely remember a video, broadcast some time ago, showing him repeatedly banging his own head on a table, to later accuse an Interior Ministry officer of assaulting him.
In the same vein, other characters associated with this marginal, violent section of the counterrevolution include such figures as Luis Manuel Otero, who has devoted himself to creating grotesque pseudo-artistic works, desecrating revolutionary values and patriotic symbols, bordering again and again on illegality.
The Cuban television news program reports that also among these small-time “actors” is Maykel Osorbo, who is constantly calling for violence, disrespect and disorder on social media, even advocating a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
Likewise, Denis Solis, whose aggressive and socially reprehensible conduct led to his conviction and imprisonment for contempt of authority, has positioned himself as the center of efforts to mobilize sentiment against supposed repression in the San Isidro farce.
Outside Cuba, the counterrevolution is managed by other individuals. During the Trump administration, their actions in the United States were carried out with the complicity, or at least silence, of authorities in that country. Yamila Betancourt, for example, is a promoter of terrorism in Cuba, openly paying for vandalism on the island, using social networks to call for crude, disrespectful acts.
Under the pseudonym of Ultrack, another representative of the counterrevolution, active on social media, seeks to transfer the aggressiveness of his language to the Cuban reality, that is, onto our streets.
Alexander Otaola initially attracted an audience and followers, addressing issues related to artists and show business, and then clearly defining his aggressive anti-Cuban position, inciting a social explosion on the island with disobedience and chaos.
Functioning simultaneously alongside these advocates of aggression against Cuba is another version of the counterrevolution, the article by Gómez notes. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is sponsoring a new or neo counterrevolution that seeks to establish itself as the less repulsive alternative, to become the option accepted by to the people.
Among those functioning along these lines is Tania Bruguera, a person who via her symbolic artistic constructions seeks benefits and positioning, with some of her actions approaching illegality, including her organization of a provocation in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución.
On this same stage, Carlos Manuel Álvarez has appeared as director of the “independent” media outlet El Estornudo, who, on social networks, has orchestrated pretentious attacks the work of Cuban doctors abroad, as well as that of Che and Fidel.
Others linked to this supposedly blander counterrevolution are Omara Ruiz Urquiola, former professor at the Superior Institute of Design, a participant in the San Isidro farce who maintains relations with high ranking representatives of the U.S. government in Cuba; as well as journalist and former University of Havana professor, Elaine Díaz, currently living abroad, who has dedicated her efforts to recruiting young journalists and university students to poison their environments and thoughts.
Joining the list are Eliécer Ávila, a young Cuban living in the United States, who has declared on many occasions that he is committed to violence and the invasion of Cuba; and Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, active in the campaign to discredit Cuban doctors serving abroad on internationalist missions.
Also a part of this tendency is Rosa María Payá, representative of Miami’s right-wing anti-Cuba forces, who recently posted on her Twitter account: “First, for years I asked the Obama administration and then the Trump administration to put the Cuban regime back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism because it is the correct, the coherent, thing to do.”
To support the activity of these promoters of regime change in Cuba, a proliferation of media outlets has been developed, including Cibercuba, El Estornudo, Cubanet, El Toque and La Joven Cuba, among others.
“These are digital media created and sustained as part of a long-term operation implemented by the CIA in Cuba, to manufacture a press that, on the Internet, would generate political content deliberately toxic to the Revolution, under the façade of journalistic work,” states Gómez in his article.
Meanwhile, in the United States, organizations such as Usaid (U.S. Aid to International Development), the NED and the Open Society Foundation encourage the promotion of new counterrevolutionary leaders with contests and scholarships, as is the case with millionaire Yoani Sánchez, among others.
In other words, both the grotesque, pro-imperialist expression of the marginalized inside and outside Cuba, and the voices advancing a more elaborate discourse, are the same counterrevolution; some outdated, of less interest to their masters, and others more appropriate in new times, using an apparently more conciliatory tone, but with the same ultimate goal: overthrowing the Revolution.
