A point of View By Paul Montesino

A point of View © 1996
A Tear for a broken land
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA, ICCP.

On October 27, 1492, Christopher Columbus set eyes on Cuba for the first time; he named it “Juana” and declared it to be “The most beautiful land that human eyes had ever seen.” Unfortunately for Cuba, it was all downhill from that point on.

The fertile island was populated by various indigenous groups, the Ciboneys and other Arawak speaking groups like the Tainos. Columbus didn’t meet civilizations that were friendly to each other, on the contrary. That unfriendliness between those two groups resulted in violence and the new arrivals were not too friendly with the natives to begin with. Pretty soon, the militarily stronger arrivals stayed and the natives were extinguished

The Pilgrims who arrived to Plymouth Colony in the sixteen hundreds encountered native inhabitants of tribes of the Wampanoag people. At the beginning, the hosts played a friendly game and together they ate enough turkey and sauce to write the first pages of the Thanksgiving calendar, but dessert wasn’t enjoyable. The Wampanoag people were pushed aside and a new nation made of Europeans who had escaped their countries for a myriad of reasons was created: the future United States, neither States nor very United for quite a while.

In both cases, the first arrivals to the discovered lands were followed by other settlers who felt safe, procreated and established a tradition of the original languages and beliefs. Interestingly enough eventually the new generations of their children rebelled against their parents and ancestors and tried successfully to become independent from them. Didn’t you try to become independent as well?

The United States defeated Spain during the Spanish American War and Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines became part of the United States. Cuba did not become independent from that ownership until May 20 of 1902, but the word “independent” had a caveat. The Cubans were required to sign an agreement with Washington called the Platt Amendment, actually an umbilical cord, giving the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever the land of Washington considered it necessary.

Between 1902 and 1934, when a “midwife” by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then President of the United States, decided to end the Platt Amendment and finally get rid of the umbilical cord, the United States intervened militarily in Cuba several times, militarily in Cuba officially in two occasions and in two others it sent in its troops unofficially under the ploy of safeguarding its economic interests. In addition, in 1903, the United States and Cuba signed a lease granting the United States permission to use land in Guantanamo as a coaling and naval station base. That agreement is still binding.

But Cuba didn’t follow an easy road on its own feet. There were several dictators, Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista the best known, who took upon themselves the questionable responsibility of doing what dictators do best: dictate to their citizens how they should live. In 1959, a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro added to the list of dictator names proposing political and economic marriage to a nation that was tired and wounded. Again, this time the country didn’t only go downhill, but it took millions of its citizens to a painful exile that lasts until this day while we look the other.

The result is maddening: Cubans are now divided between the many thousands that live in the United States and the many more who want to. There are also divisions inside the impoverished country between two groups who mistrust and fight each other and are identified by two opposed slogans, “Fatherland or Death” and “Fatherland and Life:” Your choice.

There’s much we can say about the two alternatives, but thinking carefully about those options and the price the country is paying for them, there’s only one we find appropriate: shedding a tear for the land we are no longer attached to legally, but we feel we are attached to emotionally by our birth cord. And there is no midwife who can cut it.

And that’s my Point of View today.