Carlos Gutierrez: A Poor Expert on Cuba

Gutierrez, the highest ranking official of Cuban
American origin in the US government, shows his hate
of the Cuban Revolution while demonstrating his
ignorance of the past and present on the island where
he only lived up to seven years of age from 1953 to
1960.

He is one of the least capable of passionately
defending, as he affirms, the failed and anachronistic
policy maintained by Washington against the island
since January 1959 and obsessively tightened in 2000
by the current administration.

Demagogy and manipulation go hand in hand with
ignorance in the report offered by Gutierrez in a
conference organized by the Council of the Americas,
in Washington.

Of course, it could not be any other way. This close
collaborator of Bush shared the presidency, with
Condoleezza Rice, of the so called Commission for
Assistance for a Free Cuba author of the Bush Plan
with over 400 measures aimed at destroying the
Revolution and annexing the country.

Gutierrez continued with the thesis that “Castro has
attempted to blame the United States for the island’s
economic problems, but the responsibility lies in his
own policies”.

He deliberately hides that during the 44 year old
economic war against Cuba it has registered loses
estimated at over 86 billion dollars, equivalent to
several year’s GDP.

This man, who has become the anti Cuba spokesperson of
the latest generation, rejects any possible dialog
between Cuba and the US. Any other reaction by
Gutierrez is out of the question; his arrogant and
imperious mentality makes him incapable of having a
conversation with respect and on an equal status with
those he considers inferior.

But this Senor makes himself look ridiculous when he
assumes the position of the Guru on Cuban issues and
presents the Cuban people of today as “workers on the
last plantation in Latin America”.

The smart Trade Secretary shows regrettable ingenuity.
In this case he sins with his ignorance and not bad
memory. He was barely a child when the plantations in
Cuba belonged to the United Fruit Company, King Ranch
and others, which brutally exploited the workers
forced to work for low wages and live in miserable
huts, without any social assistance.

He also ignores the over 100,000 families of
sharecroppers and tenants, forced to work land that
did not belong to them under the hot sun and who were
permanently threatened by eviction.

In Cuba, with 6 million inhabitants when Gutierrez was
born, there were a million totally illiterate: 20
percent of the population of working age were
unemployed and another 600,000 workers tied to sugar
production, who only worked three months a year and
barely survived the rest in the so called “dead
period”, a term which apparently Senor Gutierrez never
heard of.

What an embarrassment that this person, allied to the
right wing Cuban American mafia, be cast in the role
of redeemer!

We recommend, to help him get rid of some his lies,
that he read the report on the Cuban reality of 1954,
a year after his birth, by the Catholic University
Group.

It would be too much to ask him to read the
self-defense made by President Fidel Castro during the
trial for the attack on the Moncada Garrison. Although
that would be even more convincing.

Author: Angel Rodríguez Alvarez