Karla Pérez and the tale of The Bad Olive Green Pipe

(Sweet Cuba! Within you are seen In their highest and deepest degree, The beauty of the physical world, The horrors of the moral world. Hymn of the exiled, José María de Heredia Girard)

Karla Pérez González has been targeted for nearly five years, starting with her expulsion from the Central University of Las Villas, and now she has been effectively exiled, rendered a deterrent; another case, similar to the Cuban patriots José María de Heredia Girard and José Martí Pérez, who were exiled by Spanish colonialism. In her situation, however, she has been exiled by a small anti-Cuban group that still refuses to accept that they have lost everything.

The symptoms of disintegration are becoming increasingly evident in late Castroism. One day, a girl dies due to the lack of an ambulance; another day, a minister strikes a journalist; and this Friday, the bureaucrat Yaira Jiménez Roig, director of Communication and Image at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX), had to tell the tale of The Bad Olive Pipe to try to cover the sun with one finger, in response to the civic courage of a group of Cubans—both from within the country and abroad—who demanded an explanation for the latest governmental arbitrary action against citizens.

Jiménez Roig has already secured her next diplomatic position, which will shield her from Murillo's neoliberal package, from OFICODA, power outages, guards, committee meetings, and other hardships of the late Castroist carousel. However, abroad, she will still have to pretend loyalty and combativeness, sabotaging any Karlas that cross her path.

The penultimate late-Castro atrocity, which doesn’t hesitate to trample its own laws for convenience, once again highlighted the foolish subservience of the MINREX to the thought police residing within MININT and MINFAR; it is high time that the repressive forces step forward and stop hiding behind civilian bureaucrats.

What immigration offenses or violations did Karla Pérez González commit to warrant her exile? Why do Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla and his subordinate Ernesto Soberón Guzmán boast about wanting to normalize relations with emigrants, only to then have to comply with orders from the interim leaders of thought? Do Minister Rodrigo Malmierca Díaz and his subordinate Katia Alonso Cañizares truly believe that by punishing young people like the exiled journalist, they will entice emigrated Cubans to invest up to a million dollars in the struggling Castro economy?

As long as the guards—who know nothing of economics, emigration, or human beings—continue to harass citizens, Cuba will have a bipolar, ineffective government, except when it comes to producing qualified emigrants and renting out doctors to other countries. It will remain discredited in the eyes of the world's power centers, which still fail to understand its disproportionate repression, driven solely by the fear they experience.

Díaz-Canel needs to take a firm stance and, once Raúl Castro Ruz is retired, send the military back to their barracks, retire the elderly generals, and make it clear to army chiefs, the minister of the interior, and other figures who complicate the lives of ordinary Cubans that the days of bravado in Yateras are over. Until that moment arrives, he should make a gesture towards Karla Pérez González and her family by lifting the exile imposed on someone who was previously expelled from the same university where the current president graduated as an Electronic Engineer in 1982.

A look at the government's arguments to prevent a Cuban from entering Cuba brings to mind the song by Ñico Saquito, "Goodbye, Compay Gato"; because Karla Pérez González is being exiled for what the oppressors presume she would do on the island, not for what she has actually done, reaffirming the totalitarian thesis of predelictive danger, which generates so much criticism and strain both inside and outside the country.

Was the decision to expel the Cuban journalist already made, or was it hastily decided by the military upon receiving the passenger list for the COPA flight to Havana? It would be appropriate for Brigadier General Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas to come forward and explain the decision.

Is the dictatorship so weakened that it feels threatened by a young Cuban who, apart from her recent years of university studies in Costa Rica, has been educated in the Revolution's educational programs? How is it possible that late-Castroism claims to have the ability for cross-dialogue on the international stage while being incapable of engaging in dialogue with Cubans?

But the best response to the abuses of late Castroism against Cubans can be found in the poetry collection *Flores del destierro* by José Martí Pérez, who is said to be the intellectual author of the assault on the Moncada Barracks and was exiled twice by the Spanish colonial government.

(..) Of the life around me: Not even a worm Is any more unhappy: the air is theirs, And the mud in which it dies is theirs! I feel the kick of the horses, I feel The wheels of the carts; I touch my fragments: I am no longer alive: nor was I When the fateful ship weighed anchor That tore me from my homeland!