For months, the Trump administration has aimed various types of punishing force at the regime in Havana to free the Cuban people: An oil blockade. Criminal charges against the dominant leader, Raúl Castro. The deployment of an aircraft carrier and its strike group in the Caribbean Sea, hinting at an invasion.
Much of this strategy has been driven by influential Cuban Americans who have long sought retribution against the island’s communist rulers. “It will be difficult to completely control the impulse for revenge that some Cubans may feel during a transition,” an opposition leader, José Daniel Ferrer, told Cuban news outlet 14ymedio in January.
Yet another force might be strengthening among the political opposition, one that could erode the regime from within, official by official. It entails ridding oneself of thoughts of revenge and, as respected dissident and former political prisoner Óscar Elías Biscet puts it, loving one’s adversaries.
“I have acquired the capacity to love them because in this way we do away with violence, wrath, vengeance, hatred and substitute them with justice and forgiveness,” Dr. Biscet wrote in 1999.
As Dr. Biscet’s ideas have become more widely accepted among Cubans, they are seen as key to laying the groundwork for democracy. “We are not going to build a fraternal, humane, prosperous, and civilized Cuba on the basis of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’” Mr. Ferrer said, “because, as someone already said, we would all end up blind and toothless.”
During his more than 12 years as a political prisoner, Mr. Ferrer found out the practical side of loving one’s enemies and how it dissipates the fear that is the regime’s glue. His genuine affection for military officers and others who ran the prison led them to open up to him about their dislike of the government.
He told them, “Our fight was also for them and their families. I told them there was no intention of settling scores or seeing them as enemies to be persecuted.”
“When you get to know the police officer, the soldier, the civil servant; when you establish trust with them and guarantee that what they say won’t be overheard, you reach one conclusion: The regime has no one who supports it.”
For many seeking democracy in Cuba, being kind to one’s adversaries does not mean there will not be accountability for those who committed the worst atrocities. Yet, when so many Cubans have supported the regime in one way or another, the line between victims and perpetrators has become blurred. Some mix of truth-telling and forgiveness is needed.
Or as Joe Garcia, a Cuban American and former U.S. House member from Florida, told the OnCuba news outlet: “Justice implies the future. Revenge doesn’t. Revenge doesn’t care what happens the next day.”