Fifty Years On

The American blockade of Cuba serves only to attract sympathy to a regime which does not deserve it. Cuba is the country to which one ought to move if one wants a government which persecutes homosexuality, and is perhaps most notable as the model for Britain’s impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.

Now that there is no longer an Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama ought to lift that blockade. He should give no quarter to the anti-American activities of Cuban pretend-exiles, who are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like. Far from being conservative, they merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich. Hence the refusal of the late Oswaldo Payá, of his Christian Liberation Movement and of its Varela Project to have anything to do with them, and their refusal to have anything to with that Project, or with that Movement, or with Payá.

Payá stands alongside the late Jorge Rossi Chavarría, sometime Vice-President of Costa Rica, and co-founder of that country’s National Liberation Party (PLN), the Costa Rican vehicle for social democracy, affiliated to the Socialist International. A member of Opus Dei, Rossi co-founded the PLN as an outgrowth of his work as legal advisor to the Costa Rican Confederation of Workers of Rerum Novarum. Rerum Novarum is the 1891 founding text of Catholic Social Teaching with its very strong critique of unbridled capitalism, a critique continued and expanded by every Pope since.