Fidel's Praetorian Guard and its loyalty to the “continuity” of Díaz-Canel

The Caesars of "continuity" congratulated this Wednesday their Praetorian Guard, that "silent family of Personal Security that for more than six decades took care of the Commander in Chief and other colleagues."

This is how Díaz-Canel thanked the “legendary loyalty” of his “everyday companions.” He also called them “brothers,” and carried away by the legend and the revolutionary epic, he celebrated the failure of “more than 600 attacks against Fidel.”

It must be frustrating for the tenant of the Palace of the Revolution that the only attacks against his “leadership” come from his ministers and puppeteers, from his jaws and from whoever puts the words in them, and from the first or second lady.

It must make those who avoided 600 shots at Julius blush, having to carry a Cherbourg umbrella to prevent 600 spits from falling on Commodus. But that defines a Praetorian Guard, a loyalty that pays well, whether you have to wield the sword or the parasol.

The Julio-Claudian dynasty that came down from the mountains and reaches today to Nero of Placetas, is already represented in the imagination of the common people as a tyranny. Whatever you call him, today's Cuban is aware of oppression, fear, lack of rights or corruption.

He who is not aware, suffers from this reality and wonders, laments, torments or becomes indignant. Some explode. And everyone, or the vast majority, feels an immense emptiness in their stomachs, in their souls, or when they hear the word “revolution.”

The Cuban people are tired of this vacuum in the praxis and rhetoric of the tribunes. Fed up with promises, resistance, enemies, quotas, notebooks to ration hunger. Fed up with seeing the necks of those who tell him that sacrifice is necessary, of those who burst guayaberas in front of starving citizens, thicken.

Anyone who has been curious about history and not about doctrine knows that the search for freedom of Cubans faced with the Batista dictatorship ended with the rise to power of the great traitor.

The one who disrupted the republican and democratic ideal in the dogma of the revolution, the one who orchestrated the farce and usurped power to impose his tyranny, cover up his illegitimacy and perpetuate an order of total submission to an ideology, contrary to freedom and alien to human rights.

The one who armed his praetorian guard and built a regime tailored to his needs, where fidelity was more important than knowledge or the search for truth, than dignity or freedom. And now the heirs of that tyranny surround the regime and its praetorian guard with privileges and congratulations.

But Commodus is not Julius, the legionaries murmur (not all of them are clarias), the Claudia gens went into exile, many illustrious people languish in their disenchantment, others want "a change", the common people shout, beat the cauldrons and take to the streets to the first.

And the Praetorian Guard - that establishment that are not just bodyguards; but strategists, fools, matchmakers and clients crowded behind the walls of the regime - he begins to doubt between Materno and Maxentius.

It is impossible not to hear the dull roar that runs through the forum, the crying of mothers, the grinding of teeth of fathers, the train of families. And some among his generals know that human beings have the “supreme resource of rebellion against tyranny and oppression.”

So today they accept the gift and congratulations of Nero, Commodus and Caligula. And they watch their backs, their prominent bellies, their squints, their mansions, their orgies. But they sense that this emptiness that the masses ruminate on exacerbates the appetite for a new government that is based on inalienable principles and rights; like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The common people do not cook and do not eat terms of political philosophy, but they have the right to reform or abolish any form of government that becomes destructive of these principles and inalienable rights.

Because centuries of culture and evolution have given man the sacred notion of freedom and equal rights, and with this they have given him the power to organize his will and participate in public affairs. In other words, they have given power to whoever represents a majority will.

And if the Praetorian Guard knows anything, it is that power forges loyalties, that a tyrannical government is less noble and more turbulent than a republic, and that there is no force that can stop those who decide to shake off the yoke and return to live as free citizens.