
The U.S. Chargé d'Affaires in Cuba, Mike Hammer, instead of fulfilling the commitments and routine tasks of any Embassy, takes advantage of the security offered by Cuba, to show himself, publicly, making use of a right that no one has granted him, in the company of stateless persons and azotacalles of all kinds.
His actions generate confusion and raise questions. The last of his actions, loaded with melodrama, transcends the limits of interference, when he relates and calls “political prisoner” to a gentleman who is not even a political prisoner, and who is imprisoned for activities that have no relation with freedom or conscience.
He says he feels honored by the attention of this person. What is a diplomat doing assuming such functions? How does someone make judgments and calls that do not correspond to his position? Could Hammer be a time traveler?
Perhaps he got into a machine, like the one created by the imagination of the famous writer Herbert George Wells? In this case, it is possible that the traveler comes from 1902, or a little later; maybe he comes from the 30's or 50's, when Cuba was ruled by a mafioso named Batista.
It is very possible; let's remember that, in those years of the neocolonial republic, the Yankee ambassadors represented the real power in the Island, to which the “democratic” Antillean presidents were subordinated.
He will indeed be one of those proconsuls in the style of Charles Magoon, our “provisional governor” between 1906 and 1909, or Enoch Crowder, U.S. envoy in 1921, with more powers than the Cuban president himself.
Perhaps he is a copy of Ambassador Summer Welles, who ruled Cuba in the 1930's, or President Roosevelt's personal representative, Jefferson Caffery, the most interfering of the interferers.
Let us make no mistake: that is the kind of “freedom” that Mike's sponsors -Marco Rubio, Carlos Gimenez and their bad company- yearn for: the freedom to pull the strings of their Caribbean puppets without hindrance, the dispensation to plunder the country.
He acts on behalf of those who dream of turning Cuba into a den of illicit gambling, drug trafficking, that paradise of prostitution and larceny that we once were before 1959.
An exponent of the creators of the Platt Amendment walks the streets of Havana, a specter of the past that, in the name of freedom, intends to put the noose on us, and brandish the whip of compost and shame.