It’s said that President Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez of France, demonized by nations and opposing forces to his effort to make Paraguay a country where people had prosperity and paths of social justice, used to comment between disgusted and sarcastic something that here’s paraphrased by heart: "In this country where I am a dictator there are those who become famous by publishing allegations against me."

Do not expect from this article a strong and shades assessment of Rodríguez de Francia and the analyzes made on his figure, nor of Paraguay, which, under his presidency, suffered siege and devastating attacks from abroad. For this reason, he ended being crushed, turned into a diabolical image by the bourgeois and "liberal" propaganda of its time, the path followed by the current representatives of that ideology and the maneuvers aimed to preserve it.

Similar demonization suffered before, and still suffers today, the Haiti of the first independence and abolitionist revolution in America. Over here, Cuba has been suffering, which in the region rises as the first people to free itself from the U.S. imperialist power, which later was defeated in Girón and has kept thwarting it in its effort to subdue it.

More than once Roberto Fernández Retamar announced his desire to write a study - of which he left a few seeds in his texts - about an "imaginary" territory called Haipacu, a mix of the names of those three countries, to which there’s the right to add, for now, the Bolivarian Venezuela. One could speak of Haipacuve.

The historical reference on an inexhaustible topic reaches up to this point in a few paragraphs that only take a peek, based on what Rodríguez de Francia said, a brief picture about revolutionary Cuba, accused of being dictatorial. For this description, come hand in hand elements related to with humor, without entering into classifications.

It’s curious that in Cuba, in circumstances and with support one can make a career as a herald of the complacent Barak Obama in his attempt to seduce the Cuban people, and as a ridiculer of the national reality, without doing a visible wink against those who attack the country.

Closer in time and with at least a patriotic clarity, Virulo, also a humorist, expressed astonishment at a fact: the absence or long scarcity, in Cuba, of mocking Donald Trump, when humorists worldwide of different orientations made him the target of their work.

As for pleasing Obama, let’s add the denunciations of an alleged “internal blockade”, along with the minimization of what the true blockade means, the blockade, whose sponsors have reason to receive and celebrate such denunciations as expressions of complicity.

Add to this the staging - not anywhere, but in Miami where the anti-Cuban mafia that serves the empire is centrally camping - mockery about the hardships that Cuba suffers, above all, because of the imperialist harassment, which they don’t mention, and enthusiastic praise for it in the comfort of the United States, in particular of Miami itself. And none of this prevents him from returning to Cuba, to be welcomed by the media that, as far as is known, are the property of the state that is accused of being dictatorial.

To finish, let me highlight a small detail: after all that, how to prove that Cuba is governed by a dictatorship? Could it be that the aforementioned protagonists, and others, seek to promote awareness of the freedoms that exist in the country and that certainly even excessive could someone consider in some cases? Yes, because we don’t speak of an abstract country, but of a concrete, besieged, and threatened one, where those who have attacked it even militarily and announce themselves willing to do so again sponsor a pathetic internal opposition, of low rank at least in the most visible and loud part of it.

But if what the so-called protagonists seek is that, by contrast between what they say, on the one hand, and the facts, on the other, it’s clear that Cuba is not a dictatorship, perhaps they should be awarded a prize that exalts them as defenders of homeland. It’s just that—one more detail—, as long as the contrary is not proven, if you want to be objective and sensible even to a small tiny degree, nothing authorizes you to consider that they are.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff