Cuba Libre?

 The New York Times's new reporting today on the administration's lawless renditions to Eswatini has to be seen to be believed. 

I have known for at least a year that the administration is kidnapping and deporting people to secret prisons in war-torn autocracies in Africa—effectively a form of enforced disappearance. 

I've known for at least as long that people have been held in these dungeons without charge or trial, and no prospect of release if their home countries do not accept them. 

I've known that tens, perhaps hundreds of people have been subjected to this fate. 

But I didn't really know in my gut what all this means. As Arthur Koestler put it: "Statistics don't bleed."

It's not until you read the Times story that you begin to grasp what this amounts to on a human level—what it means to be abducted and disappeared to, as the reporters put it, a country you've never heard of. 

I was reading this story on my phone from a fancy hotel in Westerly, Rhode Island, where I've been on a family beach vacation all week. 

Around me are manicured croquet lawns and people in pressed white slacks and Nantucket pink shirts. 

The contrast, one might say, is jarring. Better to say: appalling. 

On the one hand—to quote Hugh MacDiarmid—I read of "men as innocent as I am / Pent in a cold, unjust walk between steel bars"—on my own government's orders.  

And on the other, here I am surrounded by "men and women / Respectable and respected and professedly Christian / Idle-busy among the flowers of their garden."

And all at once: "I am suddenly completely bereft," he writes "Of la grand amitié des choses creé / The unity of life which can only be forged by love."

The kidnapping and deportation of any human being to a forever prison, without charge or sentence or any chance to face their accusers in court, would be an abomination. 

But there is a special additional note of tragic irony in the story the Times article tells: because several of the men they profile in the piece came to the United States as Cuban refugees. 

The U.S. government promised these men, when they fled a dictatorship in Cuba and arrived with their parents as small children, that our government would welcome them with "an open heart and open arms," the Times article observes. 

Now here we are, and that "free" government of ours has apparently sent them to a foreign gulag as horrifying as any one could find in a Marxist-Leninist regime. 

Pues viva la democracia, as the Spanish refugees ironically said—in Arthur Koestler's telling—when they escaped Franco's fascists only to find themselves newly imprisoned once again in concentration camps in France. 

The U.S. government is right now, as we speak, imposing a starvation blockade on Cuba, supposedly because we think its dictatorial government is so evil and bad for its own people (and it is indeed a quite bad regime). 

But here we are, kidnapping people who voted with their feet against that regime and in favor of U.S.-style democracy, and deporting them to a fate equally horrid in a country to which they had no prior connection.

 "Why this general and puzzling outburst of hatred against those who had been the first to suffer from the common enemy[?]" as Koestler asked about France's treatment of anti-fascist refugees in his memoir Scum of the Earth. 

We might ask the same about the treatment of anti-Communist refugees in America today (some of the people being deported to these same forever prisons, by the way, are refugees from similar regimes in Southeast Asia, who likewise came to the United States under promises of "freedom"). 

Unfortunately, this betrayal of the Cuban people, this hypocrisy, this constant promise to be on the verge of "saving" the Cubans, only to then conquer, starve, and imprison them instead—has, alas, been a longstanding feature of U.S. policy toward the island. 

I quote from Ernest Crosby's poem, which captures this dynamic well: 

When we sailed from Tampa Bay

(Cuba Libre!),

And our ships got under weigh

(Cuba Libre!),

As we floated down the tide.

Crowding to the steamer's side,

You remember how we cried

"Cuba Libre!"

[...]

These are foreign words, you know—

"Cuba Libre!"—

That we used so long ago

(Cuba Libre!);

And in all the time between

Such a lot of things we've seen,

We've forgotten what they mean—

"Cuba Libre!"

Let us ask the President

(Cuba Libre!),

What that bit of Spanish meant—

"Cuba Libre!"

Ask the Senate, Root, and Hay

What on earth we meant to say,

When we shouted night and day,

"Cuba Libre!"

But alas! they will not speak

(Cuba Libre!),

For their memories are weak

(Cuba Libre!),

If you have a lexicon,

Borrowed from a Spanish don,

Send it down to Washington

(Cuba Libre!).