Some Cubans will soon be free to escape the Cuban dictatorship.
The Cuban government recently announced it would end exit visa requirements by mid-January. After which, Cubans wanting to go abroad will simply need a passport and a visa from the country they’re headed to.
Some of them, at least.
Cuba won’t simply let its people go. Emigration will remain a privilege — one more often accorded now, but still a privilege — not a right. A privilege the government may revoke at will by invoking, for example, “national security” to stop dissidents who might cause trouble abroad. Skilled professionals may be kept to “preserve the human capital created by the Revolution” — you know, on the “You Didn’t Build That” principle.
For a government (whether a dictatorship or a prelude to one) to treat rights as mere provisional gifts is nothing new. The Weimar constitution of 1919 held the rights of the individual to be “inviolable” — unless a law were passed to violate them. (Article 114.) The German’s home was “an asylum and inviolable” — unless a law were passed to violate it. (115.) Freedom of speech, freedom of movement, etc., were all guaranteed — except when the state deemed otherwise.
Yes, Cuba’s loosening of emigration rules will be a boon for those Cubans free to leave under the new rules. But the situation resembles that of a prison in which everybody is wrongly incarcerated, from which half the inmates are one day graciously released. Well, great, except . . . shouldn’t they all be released?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Libre from Cuba?”
We should trade. One Cuban aspiring for freedom for one lib-prog aspiring to socialism.
Thanks Paul for capturing the essence of “Freedom of Movement”
For me, the privilege of knowing personally Cubans who escaped and underwent harrowing imprisonment and torture then narrowly escaping Cuba and other totalitarian regimes, was a gift I was given by them. It increased my dedication to liberty as just reading about it could not.
If one recalls, during the ( I, for one, want to forget) the Carter Administartion, Cuba also allowed “dissident” to leave– Fidel castro emptied hsi mental hospitals ( some? many? I don’t recall–really were mentally ill; and his prisons–some?, many? were criminals. (I lived in teh Miam, FL area then, and crime went up with these peopel, named “The Marielitos” as they left via Mariel, Cuba.
Others were good, hard working people.
Would Raul do the same?