Democracy and freedom are two categories very much manipulated by the elite that governs the United States. It has installed them in the minds of most of its citizens as qualifiers of the model of the capitalist system that governs that North American nation, allegedly assigned by a manifest destiny to be spread throughout the world.

The "merit" of its ideologues for having managed to control the psyche of its inhabitants is even greater if one notices that they are two categories - democracy and freedom - that in today's U.S. society have acquired diametrically opposed characteristics to those that semantically correspond to them.

There are other concepts commonly manipulated by the ruling elite in the world superpower. These include human rights and governance, which they systematically use, relying on their immense resources and the possibilities given to them by the control of the media they exercise on a global scale.

It is, for example, insultingly ironic and misleading that the United States uses the economic blockade as a coercive measure against many nations. In the case of Cuba, it has seen all the rights of its people violated for more than half a century. Nevertheless, the US boasts to world public opinion that they are the main defenders of the human rights of peoples. To pretend to act, at the same time, as prosecutor and judge, in cases of violations that it only detects in governments that do not bend to Washington's will and convenience is the height of cynicism.

The practice of presenting itself as a model for the world is intended to challenge and control the management of the internal affairs of the countries that are subject to them. They always link the characteristics of such submission to their responses to requests for financial assistance, technology transfer or support in political conflicts with third countries. It should be noted that, when the Cuban revolution came to power in 1959, the struggle that unified the Cuban people for self-determination was, first and foremost, the struggle for human rights and justice, aspirations that had the Washington authorities as their main opponent.

Cuba is probably the only country in the world where not a single prisoner has ever been tortured since 1959, where no extrajudicial executions have ever taken place in this period and where no police forces have ever used jets of water, battering or other humiliating forms of repression against demonstrators. Cuba is currently the only country in Latin America where, in the last 58 years, there have been no paramilitary forces or death squads, no killings, no disappearances or torture of prisoners, and no violence against the people.

In Cuba, since 1959, (with the exception of the U. S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay), no prisoner has ever been killed, tortured, sexually raped, taken abroad to be remotely tortured, locked up without trial or simply "disappeared", in the style of the brutal Latin American dictatorships sponsored by Washington during the shameful Plan Condor. In Cuba, since 1959, only in the naval base that Washington has illegally maintained next to Guantánamo Bay, could one find civilian and military leaders who promote or permit physical torture or other equivalent forms of humiliation against detainees.

Such shameful practices were introduced in Latin America by the U.S. Defense Department's School of the Americas. Officers are trained there for the armed forces of the countries controlled by the superpower. Methods of breaking prisoners include: sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep denial, forced nudism, fear inspired by trained animals, acts of sexual or cultural humiliation, simulated execution and threats of violence or death against detainees or their loved ones, among other inhumane practices. These were spread through the barracks and military and police stations of the continent on the advice of counselors and instructors from the United States.

In Cuba, there are no political prisoners, if by that we mean people imprisoned for propagating or professing political ideas against the government.

Anyone who doubts about where democracy works and where it is pure fiction should compare, objectively and comprehensively, Cuba's electoral system - where the people are the ones who postulate, elect and control their leaders without intermediaries - with the one that led Mr. Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Or, without going any further, with the recent elections in Colombia applauded by Washington.

March 13, 2018

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.