A violent experience.
A Point of View © 1996
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA, CSP.
Violence is a long human behavioral aberration that sometimes occurs in the strangest places and unexpected moments. On September 15, 1947, in Marianao, a city west of Havana, Cuba, I was ready to go home in my school bus at the end of our school day at Colegio de Belen, my Jesuit elementary school, when we heard shots, hundreds of them.
Unnamed gangsters were shooting at a political rival called Emilio Tro, who lived nearby on 64 Street.
Our buses had to leave through a rear exit leading to La Lisa, a nearby neighborhood, to avoid the shootings. The politician Emilio Tro and a lady called Aurora Soler, who was pregnant, died.
That period of violence continued after Carlos Prio Socarras was elected President in 1948, his overthrow by Fulgencio Batista in 1952, and eventually the Marxist revolution of Fidel Castro in 1959. Violence has no place in politics. You never know where it might lead. Violence is not political; it’s criminal.
Five years later, around 1953, trying to make my commute to Belen a bit easier, my family moved to the same 64 Street, now named Emilio Tro Street, in memory of the victims of the killings. It was three blocks from the infamous house, still displaying holes from the bullets of the criminal attack.
Move the clock even later.
On Wednesday, March 13, 1957, I was the youngest member of a working Cuban National Bank subsidiary legal team assembling a bond issue of several million dollars intended to support a vast project to upgrade the much-needed Cuban railroad system.
After finally crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of the complicated bond document, all we needed was the imprimatur from the National Treasury Department. The President of the Republic, Fulgencio Batista, was the only person authorized to commit the significant investment.
Once he affixed his signature and presidential seal to the document, bond valuation agencies would approve it; banks and individual investors with deep pockets could purchase the bonds with confidence in the repayment of principal and interest.
As a symbolic reward for my technical participation in the project, I, a university business student, had the honor of delivering the document to the presidential palace for the chief executive signature.
Cuba was living a period of frequent violent activities. In November of 1956, Fidel Castro and close followers had landed on a beach in Oriente province with the intention of overthrowing the Batista government, a plan that didn’t have enough believers then.
I took a bus to the presidential palace carrying my documents in a large manila envelope and arrived at the palace located at Number 1 Refugio Street around three o’clock in the afternoon on a warm, beautiful day.
I approached the impressive entrance to the building, where an armed soldier stopped me and asked me about the purpose of my visit. I explained to him what I wanted, gave him my envelope and he stamped and signed a copy of the cover letter as evidence of my delivery. I then turned around and left.
Minutes later, as I was about two or three blocks from the palace on my way to the offices of the Cuban National Bank at 402 Cuba Street nearby, a van that advertised as a flower delivery company on the outside stopped in front of the main palace entrance. The van rear doors swung open and ten or twelve armed men carrying rifles and other weapons alighted from the van shooting and killing the guard I had just met and entering the palace with the intention of killing the President.
I heard the commotion and continued on my way; this time afraid of losing my life running like crazy and was able to reach my destination before the military officers contained the violence at the palace and protected the President. All the attackers died, and President Batista survived by hiding in a closed elevator on the second floor of the building. It is also said that he had his handgun with him to protect himself.
That day, a dozen Batista political opponents who had nothing to do with the attack died at the hands of angry members of the military. That included student leaders and candidates for political office. It is safe to say that such bloodbath opened the doors to the eventual victory of the Castro rebels still fighting in the Oriente mountains. I must add that violence became a frequent characteristic, officially or not, of Cuban political life to these days.
I use this personal experience as an introduction to a reference to the recent attempt on the life of Donald J. Trump, former President of the United States and current Republican candidate in the November presidential election. The hundreds of people who witnessed the shooting, including the few who were victims of the shooter, lived an experience similar to mine years ago. I never forgot what I lived through; the survivors will remember theirs for the rest of their lives. We carry those memories around like an old wound.
I am not trying to compare the frequent bloody violence in Cuba with the behavior of one irrational shooter who tried to end the life of one of our best-known politicians. I am trying to remind my readers that political violence is not political; it’s criminal. Once we conceive the possibility that killing one’s opponent or a well-known figure is all right, we are also contributing to a violation of basic human behavior. Unfortunately, once the mind thinks of such revulsion, it cannot be unthought. The distance between thought and execution is short.
It is up to us, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, or apolitical, to keep our conversations at a respectful level. Social media has to remain Social, not antisocial. I do not accept social media political messages from either side of the political spectrum. They are all spam to me. The victims have spouses, parents, siblings, and children. They are, in summary, humans. And we would be inhuman if we catered to any behavior that is less so.
And that’s my Point of View Today. So Long..
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