By Jesús Arboleya Cervera
The U.S. persecutes Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, accusing him of being a terrorist and a spy. But the reason is not that he planned attacks – something that never occurred to him – or that he revealed state secrets – which he could not. His sin was to bare to the world the incompetence of American diplomats.
Cuba's case is paradigmatic. With a few honorable exceptions, U.S. diplomats have passed through this capital whose actions – if collected in an anthology – would constitute a best-seller of fantasy literature, mixed with a healthy dose of tragic comedy.
By way of example, I have before me a cable from Michael Parmly, the former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, dated June 5, 2006, that attempts to show his superiors in Washington the sociological meaning of a baseball game between the teams of Industriales and Santiago de Cuba, a true classic of national baseball, held at the famed Latin American Stadium.
Parmly's experience of the unusual gathering begins with an emotional description of the game. He compares it to a clash in the so-called World Series and recounts the events almost inning by inning. I imagine that, beyond the vocation of sports commentator Parmly might have had, the political importance he attaches to the game suggests that he believed the future of this country hinged on its outcome.
Parmly describes the fans of Industriales, the Havana team, as “Creoles of Spanish descent,” a terminology that harkens back to 17th-Century Cuba, and the Santiago fans as blacks – perhaps he forgot to say freed slaves – making the game a reflection of the race war that, he says, is developing in Cuba. Thus he arrives at the enlightened discovery that we are in the presence of “two Cubas” that are potentially irreconcilable.
Ignoring that he was in the neighborhood of Cerro, the U.S. diplomat was struck to hear a lot of Afro-Cuban music in the stadium and attributed the conga to the Santiago fans, since, by his logic, only the blacks dance the rumba in Cuba and none live in Havana. This might lead one to the conclusion that the Industriales are expected to play flamenco music and shout “Olé,” as in the bullfights.
Parmly was shocked with the insults shouted by the habaneros to the rival pitcher. “Pitch, mommy, pitch,” he says the Spanish descendants shouted. And he translates “mommy” as “guajira,” giving the word a racist content that does not appear in any dictionary.
Luckily, he did not understand why some fans shouted “yellow” at the pitcher, because he might have concluded that the war was against the Chinese, placing us at the epicenter of a global conflict, on the side of the United States, which is unhappy with the progress of the Asian nation.
Although not a punch was thrown, it is clear that so much rowdiness on the part of the Cuban primitives alarmed Parmly. He says he was told by a Cuban source – apparently some opportunist eager to mooch a free swig of whiskey – that the level of “aggressive behavior” seen in the stadium was promoted by the Government itself, “to take folks' minds off where the real problem lies.”
Such ignorance of the culture of a country is pathetic, ridiculous and worrisome. It terrifies me to think that this type of character is a conduit for the foreign policy of the greatest world power.
Parmly came to Cuba with the reputation of being “a specialist in change.” In his career he was posted to Romania, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan before coming to the island boasting of being an expert, since one of his grandmothers was born in Cuba but left the country in 1920 to marry an American general – perhaps on temporary duty here, as was the custom. Perhaps the lady's nursery tales made the child yearn for the colony.
Parmly's avowed aspiration was to become the architect of the “soft coup” that would lead to the overthrow of the Cuban government. To that end, he handed out dollars left and right, in addition to turning the USINT into the social club for “the opposition,” which his replacement, Jonathan Farrar, in another cable disclosed by WikiLeaks, described as “strangers [...] more concerned with getting money than with taking their budgets to broader sectors of Cuban society.”
If Parmly had wished to examine the legacy of racism in Cuba, he should have read the works of true experts in the field, should have attended the forums where the topic is usually discussed, or reviewed what was said by the principal leaders of the country, since this is an issue that has been given maximum attention for many years.
But that would have been too ambitious an intellectual exercise for the U.S. official sent by W. Bush to Cuba. Furthermore, his objective was not that, but to please his leaders and acolytes, echoing the craziest propaganda campaigns, to which he added its own xenophobia.
In summary, Parmly struck out at Latin American Stadium, but no one heard anything about it until WikiLeaks did us the favor of informing the world.
