By coincidence, I saw this article just a bit ago. He NAILED it perfectly.
I’ve lived under Donald Trump and Fidel Castro. Both taught me the importance of defending truth.
¡Cuidado con el coco! This warning about a mythical character, never seen but feared, was a staple of childhood in Cuba. A boogeyman,
el coco kept us in line by making us afraid of the unknown. But I was also taught that there was another threatening creature, a real one: The United States was the ultimate el coco, whose big toothy shores wanted to devour our island. Fearing it would keep us in line.
...
It also made me aware that
the extremes meet in the end and that whether on the left (as in Cuba) or on the right (as in Trumpism), extremism for the sake of power results in the erosion of human thought, truth and agency. The Gospel I believe in stands up against lies, wherever they come from, and against anything that assails the common good. These are not values shared by either extreme.
At the height of the pandemic, I asked someone to please mask up or move away, only to hear them cry, “It’s a free country!” People who have no idea what it is to have no freedom under a brutally repressive regime bandy about phrases like this. It is insulting. It is ignorant. It is the outcome of a world in which ideologies no longer mean anything and at the same time have intensified and appear to mean everything
...
This is the truth no one wants to talk about because the powerful on the left and on the right benefit from it.
A truly communist country would not build tourist hotels—that’s capitalism. A truly democratic country would not pass voter suppression laws like those being sponsored by Republican legislatures; that is undemocratic and dangerous.
...
When Pope Francis brokered a
rapprochement between the United States and Cuba in 2014, he knew exactly what he was doing: Take away
el coco, deal a blow to the Cuban propaganda machine, bring about relations people to people. Undo the false ideological labels. Help all. I hope that those of us who live in the world of both/and truth-telling will prevail across the 90 miles that separate us. If we focus on the truth of the common good in Cuba, here and everywhere, then the path is clear.
Adiós, el coco.
