The “Well-Informed,” the “Badly-Informed” and Those Who Pretend to Act The Fool

The "Well-Informed," the "Badly-Informed" and Those Who Pretend to Act
The Fool / Eliécer Ávila
Eliécer Ávila, Translator: Unstated

From Diario de Cuba
Often when someone speaks out in a way that displeases the system's
officials, they resort to option three in the manual in order to
downplay the importance of, or discredit, the individual who expressed
an opinion: "You can see that so-and-so is quite misinformed, in order
to talk about this issue you should first inform yourself about it."

They must have a lot of nerve to ask, or rather to demand, that anyone
in Cuba inform themselves. First, we should clarify what is meant by
being well-informed today. Any conclusion you could come to about
broad-based subjects would require the ability to consult the internet,
where it is normal to find people who think and bring their knowledge,
from whatever field.

So, to ask a Cuban who doesn't have the privilege of accessing the
internet (the vast majority) to be well-informed, is a subtle but
exquisite way of acting the fool.

On the other hand, if you are one of the chosen who has a window onto
the internet and you use it to write a better criticism or to express
yourself using details that disagree with the system, it's almost
certain that the following day you will no longer enjoy your window on
the world because it will have been closed.

So it is that pretending to be a fool is a fundamental requirement —
from a State workplace — to be able to continue to count on a certain
level of access to the net. This has become a science in which some have
achieved stellar performance.

To be fair, we have to recognize that even so, some people, at the risk
of losing their access, do share information and even offer the person
sitting next to them their chair so that they can become better informed
and participate in the ongoing debates constantly being generated,
debates which, unjustly and without warrant, remain foreign to our
uninformed people.

It is also true that the internet is not the only way to get information
on certain topics. But no sensible person should ignore that the Cuban
government and, following its orders, all the institutions of the
country, do not provide some information to anyone, much less that which
would be needed to be able to write the data-filled articles that "those
who pretend to be fools" expect of us. Here everything is classified and
it is never declassified. Although the President says that we must fight
against the practice of secrecy, this is one of the things that can't
change because without its secrets this system would cease to exist.

In this context, those who refuse to pretend to be fools, and who are
not willing to negotiate access and communications in exchange for
silence and complicity, are left with no other option than to appear
uninformed before the nasty gaze of the "private statistics gurus" who
make videos for their own consumption about this country as it bleeds to
death. Videos about the magnates who keep the real information in their
strong boxes under a thousand combinations.

What these "well-informed" don't know is that there are two halves of
this real information about our country: one that is in their
strong-boxes and the other scattered in a thousand pieces throughout the
Island.

Every necessity of Cubans, if you look closely, is contained in a story
whose opening pages we don't know well, because they are in the strong
box; but we do know the ending, because it is on our empty plate that
shines like a magic mirror and that tells the story better than anyone
and, fortunately, our plate does not care to act the fool.

From Diario de Cuba.

29 June 2012

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