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The Deputy Director General for the United States at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX), Johana Tablada de la Torre, spoke out once again to deliver a tirade against the new national security memorandum signed by U.S. President Donald Trump, which strengthens the embargo and prohibits tourism from the United States to the island.
Demonstrating her adept handling of the official narrative -that usual blend of propaganda, victimhood, and cynicism with which Havana tries to mask its responsibility for the national tragedy imposed for over six decades-, the official launched a barrage of histrionic accusations to bolster the faltering image of the Cuban regime.
How can it be claimed that strengthening an economic blockade... helps the Cuban people?, Tablada de la Torre asked on her social media. Her post - overflowing with bitterness against the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and Cuban-American politicians - does not withstand the slightest exercise of logic.
The answer is simple: by pressuring a totalitarian regime that has seized national sovereignty and uses state resources not to improve the lives of Cubans, but to sustain a repressive machinery, a military-business caste, and an elite that has transformed the people's poverty into personal gain. It is not the people who are the target of the sanctions; it is the apparatus that oppresses them.
“How can it be justified... that by taking away freedoms and rights from both peoples, liberty is defended?”, she added. One would have to ask the diplomat which freedoms she is referring to. Are they the ones her government systematically denies to Cubans? Are they the freedom to express oneself without fear of imprisonment, as so many journalists, activists, and independent artists have faced? Are they the freedom to associate or to found a party, as prohibited by the constitution imposed by the PCC? Or are they the freedom to prosper without relying on the patronage network of a military enterprise like GAESA?
Tablada de la Torre seems to forget that in Cuba there are no free elections, no separation of powers, no independent press, and no judicial guarantees. He speaks of "taking away rights" as if the regime he represents hasn't institutionalized repression as a form of government and state policy. The height of his hypocrisy is to speak of "suffocation" when his regime daily suffocates millions of Cubans under control, surveillance, and fear.
How can one criminalize travel, trade, and the livelihood of a country while normalizing the most inhumane blockade? What the United States criminalizes are not travel or trade, but the financing of military and repressive structures that control and manage the tourism sector, imports and exports, and the dollarized economy in an opaque manner, with the only support they provide to the population being through the rationing booklet or in their dollar stores, that currency with which they do not pay their workers.
What is being regulated are the transactions with entities that do not represent the people, but rather a system of domination. What is intended to be limited is the opaque business of the generals, not the human contact between peoples. And if we speak of an "inhumane siege", it could begin with the one imposed by the regime that prevents Cubans from leaving the country freely or deciding their own destiny without fear of persecution or exile.
In his propaganda outburst, Tablada de la Torre blamed Rubio for being the architect of every measure against the regime. He presented him as if he were omnipotent, capable of controlling the presidential cabinet and dictating the foreign policy of the world's leading power. This theory of a permanent conspiracy against Cuba is old, tiresome, and above all, ineffective.
The new memorandum is nothing more than a continuation of a policy that distinguishes between the Cuban people and those who oppress them. It supports free internet access, independent media, the emergence of a real private economy, and the weakening of structures like GAESA, which concentrate the economic power of the country in the hands of a military caste.
That Tablada de la Torre referred to it as "a little package" does not make it any less forceful. What annoys the regime is not the content, but its effectiveness. Because they know that the real siege is not imposed by Washington, but rather the one they themselves have constructed around freedom, the right to choose, and the possibility of change.
If they truly cared about the suffering of Cuban families, the government that Tablada de la Torre serves would initiate a process of democratic transition, allow free and plural elections, respect human rights, and put an end to the absolute control it exerts over national life. But they prefer to continue trading in victimhood, conspiracies, and resentment.
As long as that does not happen, every measure that weakens the regime and strengthens the citizen will not only be justified but also necessary.
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