Refugee or Whatever?

By Adriaan van Ginkel

These last days the tragedy of scores and scores of refugees on rickety boats and vessels coming from North Africa has been the biggest international news item. Many don’t make it and drown in the choppy Mediterranean Sea, which is particularly tempestuous in spring.  Before I go on, I would like to express my deepest regrets at this human tragedy now taking place before a speechless European Union whose tongue seems to be stolen by some cat.

That said I would to ask you to divert your attention to the other side of the Atlantic. The picture I put here above was not taken in the Mediterranean, but in the Caribbean. And the refugees barely making it on their “boat” are Cubans. All these years, the world seems to have forgotten the constant stream of Cubans fleeing the so-called Sea Of Happiness of the Castro regime and risking their lives through shark-infested waters to make it to the US or anywhere where they can stay and live their lives as they choose. Which is the main goal of any true refugee fleeing his or her country. I’ll come back to the Cuban experience, but I first finish my line of thought on what is happening in Southern Europe.

Considering this thought of what drives true refugees, the world is full of them. Everywhere you look people are migrating on their own free will or wandering around as refugees because they see no other option. In both cases, the results are traumatic because no one – and I speak out of own experience – really wants to abandon their homeland. Migration, whether voluntary or forced, produces rootless people which constitute a sorry sight generally speaking. I hear of about 70 or more people drowning in the Mediterranean, and of another case in which twins were born on the high seas. One reads about children drowning in a capsized boat together with their parents, which happened just a day or two ago. My question in this particular case – the wave of people trying to reach Europe from the North African coast – is what pushes these desperate persons to risk it all, their lives and that of their children, to leave their home countries and reach a land that maybe doesn’t want them, if you consider carefully the anti-immigrant mood wandering about in the EU countries.

Curiously, no one even asks this question, let alone answers it. Even stranger, there is no movement from other navies to assist the Italian one in coping with the human tsunami hitting the coasts of Italy. Put a NATO aircraft carrier near Sicily and coordinate rescue operations from there, for crying out loud! What are they waiting for? The EU and the UN appear dumbfounded, mumbling and confused in trying to interpret a human tragedy that is filling coasts with drowned corpses. Being an avid news follower, I personally connect this refugee tragedy with what is happening in the Middle East - the slaughtering of the oldest Christian communities and other non-Arab or non-Islamic groups by blood-soaked ogres claiming to butcher in the name of Allah and Islam, producing an enormous wave of displaced Syrians and Kurds fleeing in front of their intended killers who are completely identified together with their ideas and their aims. And of course, those displaced people will try to get away from certain death and jump in leaky boats to get to the other side.

Now, Libya, a former dictatorship and at the same time one of the more stable Arab countries before the US decided to get rid of that crazy dictator (and get him lynched), splitting the country in at least two parts, has become the new stage for decapitating Christians. How did their murderers make the jump from Syria and Iraq to Libya? What is really happening in the Middle and the Near East? Has it anything to do with the civil war in Yemen? And what about the disturbing notion that before long, those butchers on the Libyan coast might make the same journey as the desperate boat people and jump over to Malta and Sicily, touching European soil?

I don’t know whether you get my point. I will explain it anyhow. My point is that beyond shedding our tears in synchronism with the world news media about yet another human tragedy, nothing has been done by anyone in averting this happening in the first place. No single government has called together a meeting of world and regional leaders to find out what the heck is going on in the Mediterranean and where these boat people come from. Are they all refugees, in the first place, or are there jihadists among them planning to cause mayhem in Europe? What did cause their desperate flight - the “Islamic State”, or the civil war ensuing from the fall of the Libyan Gaddafi regime years ago, or a combination of the two, or maybe something else? How can this refugee wave be stopped in a reasonable way, i.e. not blowing them out of the water? Questions to which no real answer has been given till now - have you noticed?

Now back to the Cubans fleeing their island. Their reasons are fully known for decades. Apart from the Tony Montana’s fulfilling their criminal version of the American Dream, most Cuban refugees just want to live a normal life outside the hunger prison island that Cuba has become since 1960. The US, being only 80 sea miles away, is the preferred destiny. There is of course a political factor – many of them have spent time in Castro’s prison system and have nothing to lose anymore there. In the early 1960’s, Cuban refugees were primarily fleeing from mass executions led by among others the “martyr of socialism” Che Guevara. In later decades they kept fleeing in mass from a life in hopeless poverty and political coercion / threat under Fidel Castro and his club. All this qualifies these Cuban boat people, according to UN standards, to be regarded as true refugees who try to improve their abysmal life situation and live in liberty. Unless you think these ordinary Cubans are CIA agents and should be locked away or shot (I know people who think that way), I hope you agree with me that one wishes these people the same life we wish for ourselves.

But why has the world looked the other way all this time? Is the human mask of the Castro regime stronger than the bloody facts behind it? Now, with the improvement of US-Cuban relations these days, a nagging voice keeps telling me that the situation of the Cuban refugees, who still try to flee an island in which nothing will really change for the coming years, will only get worse. Possibly one day they won’t be regarded anymore as refugees, but sent back to Cuba, something that has already happened in Panama quite recently. Good relations between the US and the Castro regime, especially if no Republican takes the White House in 2016, might mean that the door on Cuban refugees might close for good one day. And that Cuba might then evolve into a second North Korea from which it will be impossible to escape.

Yesterday I had to go to a pharmacy in Caracas, in the San Bernardino area, to buy some medicine for my poor mascot with a urinary problem. With the vet’s receipt in my hand, I parked my car and walked towards the pharmacy. There was a queue in front, of about seven persons. Normally, if there is a queue in front of a shop, regulated (=scarce) goods are distributed there piece-meal. But if you don’t want to buy any of these, you are free to enter the shop and buy whatever you want. Not with this pharmacy, however. There was even a Chavist militia member in full uniform standing next to the queue, adding a queer mood to the scene. I asked the people why there was a queue and added that I only wanted to get some medicine. The only answer I got was that I had to stand in the queue, regardless of what I wanted to do there. I asked whether they were selling regulated goods, but got no answer from anybody. I got behind a lady who started complaining in a desperate way to me about how Venezuela was going. I asked her why people were accepting that queue if there was no apparent need for it. She answered “Señor, people are getting accustomed to stand in a queue. Don’t you see that nobody even asks why?” Nevertheless, there was a discussion going on between the militia man and the other present persons about the abysmal situation in the country and who was to blame for it. The militia man blamed everyone against Chávez and Maduro of course, and everyone else told him to open his eyes and see who the true thieves are and where they can be found in the government. But I noticed that the people arguing were careful with their words. They clearly were afraid, as one of them commented to me later, that that guy in uniform would at a certain point grab his cellphone and call in some Guardia Nacional, resulting in nasty scenes already seen here and there, also by myself. No one wanted to end his day in a prison cell accused of disrupting the peace and being a paid agent of the opposition… 

At that moment it again became clear how Venezuela is steadily but surely becoming a clone of Castrist Cuba with minimal effort. Yesterday in San Bernardino, Caracas, a little guy in his fifties with a small moustache could evoke fear in a group of let’s say ten annoyed shoppers just by showing himself in full militia uniform. In some other country that man would have encountered a more forceful response. People don’t ask questions anymore, they just get in the queue. And every one with whom I speak converses in a hushed voice as if they could get arrested at any moment. Having been in Prague in 1990 just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and encountering people with the same distorted pattern of behavior as now in Caracas, the Orwellian mechanism of subduing whole populations by means of menace and coercion stands gleaming before me in Venezuela in all its totalitarian glory. To me, Venezuela is on a steady course that will lead to totalitarism. If people prefer hushing up and not asking questions to stand up and not accept the situation anymore, then democracy and freedom will become dead words here before you know it. I’m not pretending to be some Cold War freak, but I see it happening before my eyes. I was born and bred under the Cold War, on the Western side, and became aware of how the other side had to cope with totalitarian regimes. My whole Venezuela experience this last decade has been a déjà-vu experience of the Cold War with few new things added. And it keeps sounding more and more like a scratched record of that dark period.

Personally I think that with the near-impossibility for countless of Venezuelans to leave their country in a normal way, if even only for a short trip, the day will come that the world will see with astonishment how ordinary Venezuelans on boats and rafts will try to reach the nearby islands under Dutch rule, fleeing from a jail with invisible walls. Colombian contacts have already told me that there is a fear in their country that Colombia will soon become awash with Venezuelan refugees, coming over from the landside. But as it happens now, I guess that when that boat people day arrives and the Caracas regime will try to cover up the embarrassment, the world will just look the other way. Why endanger relations with a major OPEC member and trigger a minor economic crisis? Apart from some worried eyebrows here and there, the world governments and their media will ultimately leave Venezuela and her people to their fate, just as it has been done with the Cubans and with the incredible refugee tragedy in the Middle East. Things will only start moving, as it is happening right now in the Mediterranean, when dead people start floating right up to the front door of the West and something must be done to explain a tragedy that cannot be covered up anymore.  

I guess that for me and my family, it is getting time to move out before it’s too late. I will keep you posted on that!

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© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015