If the Idler’s Column was still being published, the late Graham Linscott would have had a field day taking apart the hyperbole and duplicity of Cuba Society activist Clever Banganayi’s spirited defence of Cuba’s dystopia ( The Mercury, January 28).
To be fair, however, Banganayi’s piece is a model essay on how truth can be distorted and inverted. Repeatedly he refers to Cuba as having a sovereign government wedded to the principle of self-determination. Yet in reality it is a communist dictatorship which has been the fiefdom of the Castros for 60 years. But in Banganayi’s lexicon, oppression is freedom.
He boasts that Cuba has “stood up against imperialism.” However, the record shows that Cuba was a vassal state under Soviet imperialism until 1991. Since then it has allied with Chinese imperialism. Banganayi rails against “plunder” by the “international order” yet is silent about the Castro family’s plunder of Cuba and how Fidel Castro became a billionaire. That said, Banganayi exhibits another fine example of when propaganda is rendered as truth.
That line of deception echoes blatantly in his insistence that “Cuba is a free and independent nation that will not give in to threats.” If that was the case, why do many Cubans languish in jails because they oppose the oppression which masquerades as freedom? How is it that more than one million have fled Cuba because of repression and disillusionment with communist dystopia?
Fear that Trump may end communist dictatorship of Cuba and liberate its oppressed people, reflects Banganayi’s realization that the looting and exploitation that has sustained the communist elite for six decades would end – the same fear the ANC has of losing power in South Africa.
Content to parrot the lie that “law and justice” prevail in Cuba, Banganayi is silent about the impoverishment of the majority of Cubans where in the 21 st century, basic access to water is not out of a tap but out of a bucket and where all aspects of life are regulated by the communist regime.
As the Overton Window widens in 2026, Clever Banganayi’s days of churning out untruths about Cuba are not looking too promising because Trump is not going to compromise on the Monroe Doctrine as it applies in the Caribbean.
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