Victim and executioner of its own people and of an entire region
The first Spaniard to set foot on Cuban soil was Christopher Columbus, on October 28, 1492, landing in the eastern part of the island, in a place he called Bariay, and naming the island “Juana” in honor of the Catholic Monarchs, although he believed he was in Asia.
Five centuries ago Miguel de Cervantes wisely warned: “Dear Sancho: I find with sorrow how palaces are occupied by boors and huts by wise men.
I was never a defender of kings, but worse are those who deceive the people with tricks and lies, promising what they know they will never give them.
This country, beloved Sancho, dethrones kings and crowns pirates, thinking the king’s gold will be distributed among the people, not knowing that pirates share only among pirates.”
For 67 years the government of the island, A DICTATORSHIP, has been spreading its overbearing doctrine across this America, stifling the economic and social development that its riches and capabilities would have made possible.
Juan Bautista “Tata” Yofre, a renowned Argentine journalist and researcher, currently in charge of his country’s Intelligence School, is the author of “IT WAS CUBA”.
In this text he immerses himself in the historical context of the Cold War and analyzes in detail how the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro became a key actor in spreading guerrilla violence throughout Latin America.
He examines in detail how the Cuban regime, backed by the Soviet Union, exported its revolution and communist ideology to other Latin American countries beginning in the 1960s.
Cuba played a fundamental role in creating support and training networks for guerrilla groups in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay.
Through exhaustive research, supported by declassified documents found in the archives of the security forces of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Cuba, East Germany, and Argentina, and by testimonies from various actors of the time, Yofre exposes the inner workings of the strategies used by Cuba and the Soviet Union to foster subversive violence and left-wing totalitarianism in the region.
He examines in detail the participation of the Soviet Union in this dynamic, highlighting how resources, military advising, and political support were obtained for guerrilla movements backed by Cuba.
It is the analysis of a phenomenon little explored in the social sciences, generally dominated by left-leaning writers, who attempt to conceal the responsibility of leftist movements in Latin American dictatorships, focusing their attention solely on U.S. interventionism, as important as Soviet interventionism.
I invite you to explore this objective and documented investigation, with the superb pen of the “Prince of Wits”.
Of Strange Isles and the Treacheries of Wit.
In a place in the Caribbean, whose name I do not wish to forget, but to denounce, it came to pass that reality disguised itself as epic, the better to conceal its nature as farce.
The discreet are right to say that history is the name we give to our mistakes, and in these southern lands, mistakes were legion and had as their godfather a gentleman of thick beard and tireless speech.
The Portrait of an Island.
That Caribbean hidalgo, who beneath the canopy of freedom hid the rigor of the scepter, soon understood that nothing is as dangerous as being too modern, for one runs the risk of suddenly becoming outdated.
Thus, while the world divided into two camps like cardboard armies in a puppet show of Master Pedro, he decided that his destiny was not to till his own land, but to sow discord in another’s.
“Ambition is the last refuge of anyone who lacks the patience to cultivate a garden, but has the audacity to set the neighbor’s on fire.”
The Chronicles of Deceit.
The chronicles of Yofre tell us, written with the pen of one who has seen the archives and not only the clouds, that from Havana there departed galleons loaded not with gold, but with gunpowder utopias.
These knight-errants of the revolution, armed with the steel of ideology and the helmet of arrogance, crossed the seas to right imaginary wrongs, only to leave in their wake the bitter trace of blood and disillusion.
We were sold a Greek tragedy, but it was performed like a Russian operetta.
The rulers of the South, like Quixotes without honor, let themselves be seduced by the siren song of a bearded Dulcinea who promised heaven in exchange for their sovereignty.
Oh, what a terrible vice sincerity is when it is not accompanied by truth.
A brotherhood of peoples was feigned to conceal a satrapy of interests.
At the end of this journey of spies and guerrillas, we discover that the only thing one should do with good advice is pass it on to others, for it never helps oneself.
Cuba, in its eagerness to be the center of the universe, ended up as the puppeteer of a performance in which the saddest puppets were its own children, and the naive applauders were us.
Time may well erase the traces, but this book remains as testimony that, in politics, being natural is the hardest pose to maintain, and that whoever believes himself the savior of a continent is often the one who best knows how to chain it, subdue it, and destroy it.