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Even though a few weeks ago the Fidel Castro regime announced that Cubans' passion for socialism had led 99 percent of them to petition in a referendum to the rubber-stamp parliament, the Assembly of Popular Power, to make it constitutionally "irrevocable" for future generations, some two weeks ago the very same regime was working hard to deny rumors that a new Mariel Ñ a massive exodus to the U.S. coasts Ñ was about to happen.
On July 3 the Cuban regime warned its citizens not to be victims of "false information" that, coinciding with the U.S. national celebration of the 4th of July, boats from southern Florida would reach the northern coast of Cuba to pick up anybody that would want to leave the island.
The official communiquŽ was a response to the wave of rumors that was flooding Cuba around that time that the regime was ready to allow a massive exodus of Cubans to get rid of dissidents.
Repeatedly broadcast over radio and television, the communiquŽ stated that any boat that reached Cuban waters would be caught and its occupants would be accused on trafficking in migrants.
"Counterrevolutionary radios have been broadcasting the rumor that on the 4th of July boats from the United States would come to pick up people that wanted to travel illegally to the United States," said the official communiquŽ. "These are vulgar provocations of Miami's terrorist Mafia . . . Nobody should allow himself to be fooled. We want to make this clear: any boat coming from abroad that illegally penetrates our territorial waters, and is intercepted, will be confiscated and its crew tried as migrant traffickers to the full extent of the law. Nobody will be authorized to leave the country illegally"
The rumors, widespread in the provinces of Havana and Pinar del Rio, began to circulate when Castro warned that the migration agreements with the United States could be cancelled if Washington and the U.S. Interest Section in Havana Ñ the unit that maintains a sort of low-level diplomatic connection between the two countries Ñ continued actions that were considered hostile.
The Cuban regime hastened to state that Castro's words had been misinterpreted. "It was not a threat; it was just a factual analysis," said Luis Fern‡ndez, a spokesman for the Cuban Interest Section in Washington. "It was an honest reflection on events."
However, it is hard not to believe that Castro was creating the conditions for triggering another exodus, such as those in 1965, 1980 and 1994, to get rid of part of the domestic opposition.
Whatever Castro's intention might have been, the rumor of a possible exodus spread quickly through Cuba, and with it the instructions for those who wanted to take advantage of it: be waiting beyond the 12 miles that define Cuban waters.
There were reports that this advice was followed by many Cubans, and the began to build rafts to reach international waters. This led the regime to go even farther, increasing police patrolling of the land in the northern coast of the island and even using much of the precious fuel that is in short supply to launch an intense patrolling of the sea around the region.
The United States welcomed the Cuban government's effort to stop illegal migration. "We have been trying hard to achieve an orderly migration process", said Charles Barclay, a State Department spokesman. "We are glad to hear of any public discouragement" of a massive exodus.
The Assembly of Popular Power turned into law the petition supposedly backed by a 99 percent of the Cubans making socialism "irrevocable", but it seems that this rebellious one percent has such an exceptional power that the prospect it might want to leave the island has mobilized the preventive rhetoric of the regime and its police forces.
Coincidentally with these concerns of the regime about the possibility that an extraordinarily large "one percent of Cubans" might want to abandon the socialist paradise, Castro has called for elections in October to choose deputies to the Assembly and delegates to its municipal and provincial assemblies. However, not only Cubans will have a limited option in terms of choosing candidates Ñ Henry Ford's dictum that people could buy his Model T in any color as long it was black comes to mind Ñ according to the "one-candidate" system that remains of the Soviet past, but they will not be able to reelect Castro as "president," for the simple reason that he will not be exposing himself to the voters' judgement.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com
