July 15, 2021
Rats fleeing Cuba's sinking ship? Resignations and calls for ending communist dictatorship are coming fast
By
Monica Showalter
So are the rats fleeing the ship in Cuba?
It's always a bad sign when the elites start resigning during times of crisis, as if to get out early to save their skins. There's more than one now as Cuba erupts into protests and calls to end the communist dictatorship, so it's getting to be a pattern.
So here we got one report of a resignation of one of the regime's thuggier members, Cuba’s Deputy Minister of the Interior, Brigadier General Jesús Manuel Burón Tabit, according to top Cuba expert Carlos Eire, writing at the indispensible
Babalu blog.
Eire has a loose translation of the news from
ABC Spain:
Cuba’s Deputy Minister of the Interior, Brigadier General Jesús Manuel Burón Tabit, has resigned after questioning decision-making within the ministry and the Security Council, as well as the excessive use of police force to repress the demonstrations of 11 July, the day that began the wave of protests that spread throughout the island, as ABC has learned from sources close to the regime.
That's one of guys in charge of torture and internal spying. Based on his official
photo, he looks like the kind of guy you wouldn't want to meet while chained in some Castroite dungeon:
But he's the guy who, after a career as a top Cuban internal security official, reportedly felt the government was going too hard on the protestors.
According to
ABC of Spain (Google translate has some faultiness here, but you can get the gist):
His departure is motivated by disagreements with other commanders, differences with respect to the measures taken during the protests last weekend. "There is trouble within the Army and differences between the military of the old guard and young generals," say the sources consulted by this newspaper.
The news would also have been confirmed by the analyst and writer Juan Juan Almeida in his program Juan Juan Al medio. According to Almeida, the also member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba, requested his resignation in the lobby of building A of the Ministry of the Interior. His words when he left office were: "Applying the law with strict adherence to it does not mean murder," said Juan Juan.
Maybe it's true, as the information about this blotting-paper-face apparachik is sparse.
It's also interesting that the Cuban government has denied the report, calling it "fake news." Perhaps that is true, too, given this guy's record. Or perhaps they forced him to "un-resign."
But after searching who this Castroite apparachik was over the years, it's likely he wasn't all that happy with the current Castroite government, so maybe he did want to quit, although there are reasons to think he didn't, as well.
Based on his career, before the uprising, he was doing things like this, as described by Juventud Rebelde, a
Cuban state organ:
The Comandante Arides Estévez Sánchez Superior Military School held this Friday morning the graduation ceremony of the 62nd Anniversary class of the Assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks.
As part of it, more than 150 cadets were promoted to the first grade of officers in the legal profile, who knelt on the ground vowed to be worthy heirs of the glorious combative traditions of our people, the working class, the Party, and to follow the example of heroism, self-denial and sacrifice of the forgers of our true and definitive independence.
"The future performance of each of the graduates should be presided over by intelligence, simplicity, modesty, fidelity to revolutionary principles, firmness and a high fighting spirit," said the president of the Ministerial Examinations Commission, Brigadier General Jesús Manuel Burón Tabit.
Kind of boring, actually.
Meanwhile, among the Castroite elites, there was a "re-election" of government last April, which was how the Cubans ended up with the zero-charisma Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez as their nominal dictator. This party session only comes along every five years, and Buron Tabit got ... the same job he had for awhile, that of Central Committee member, which is the rubber-stamp body of the Politiburo, the small 14- or 17-person group (I've seen conflicting reports) which holds the real power. He got passed over.
k0lwc.com
bigleaguepolitics.com
web.archive.org
