Opportunistic Foreigners Who Suck the Dictatorship’s Tit - Alessandra Riccio, the Most Castroite of All the Neapolitans

Opportunistic Foreigners Who Suck the Dictatorship's Tit: Alessandra
Riccio, the Most Castroite of All the Neapolitans / Angel Santiesteban
Posted on July 7, 2014

Alessandra Riccio, a Neapolitan who resides in Cuba, knew how to live,
like so many leftist foreigners, from the benefits that the totalitarian
regime offered them. I don't know if she came to be one more of the
secret collaborators of State Security, captured by Commander Manuel
Pineiro "Red Beard," of course, dead in suspicious circumstances at a
time when that death was very convenient for the Castro brothers,
because with his secrets as Fidel's private scribe he could sink them
before international justice.

What is certain is that the lady in question has written a book about
her memories of Cuba, at least those that she can or they permit her to
tell, because if she tells some others she would be catalogued as a
traitor by those who helped her out for so many years on the
island.Without seeing the book — really among the list of texts that I
need to read, I don't plan to give it space — I am sure that she did not
tell, logical with her usual lack of honesty, that when she was a juror
of the story genre in the "Casa de las Americas" prize in 1992, together
with the Cuban and great writer Abilio Estevez, and the fabulous
Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela, State Security prohibited them from
awarding my book "South: Latitude 13," because of the heartbreaking
stories of the internationalist Cubans in Africa.

She will not tell that they, as jurors, gave into those "extraliterary"
demands because, according to Abilio, the political police officials
told them that if they gave me they prize they would do me much harm.
Coincidentally, an aide to Riccio told me that a little later she left
Cuba disappointed and hurt for having seen herself "obliged to commit
such injustice;" so much so, according to what they told me, that she
had denied meeting me because of the shame that she felt because of her
actions.

Abilio and Valnezuela, on the contrary, did decide to confront their
guilt and tell me what happened. The first one explained to me what
happened; then he did it with others, above all several years later on a
trip to the Dominican Republic, when he told that shameful incident to
several colleagues and editors, who corroborated their pain and shame
because of that literary assassination.

For her part, on meeting me, Luisa Valenzuela was surprised by how young
I was (I remember that she exclaimed that I was the same age as her
daughter), and immediately proposed to take me to Argentina, a gesture
that I appreciated although I refused.

For further embarrassment, last year, at the beginning of my
incarceration, Riccio appears in a grisly list of "women against
violence," supporting the government's injustice which sentenced me
without evidence, in a biased trial where nothing that my lawyer did to
demonstrate my innocence with five witnesses, videos, and documentary
proof, which Riccio could have easily consulted on the internet, did any
good.

But as in old times from the already mentioned Commander Red Beard, she
prefers to attend swiftly to the call of the tyrant to shape her
signature, as if it were not enough already to shoulder the weight of
the shame of that other literary injustice that she had committed
against my person and my literary career.

Now nostalgia has made her write a book remembering the authorized part
that she can narrate, and the newspaper Granma has gotten a photo and a
report about her love for Cuba (although I would dare to correct and
change Cuba for dictatorship). Do not worry, Riccio, your role as
bootlicker has suited you well, and the tyrant rewards you.

Congratulations!

Angel Santiesteban-Prats

Lawton prison settlement. May 2014.

Source: Opportunistic Foreigners Who Suck the Dictatorship's Tit:
Alessandra Riccio, the Most Castroite of All the Neapolitans / Angel
Santiesteban | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/opportunistic-foreigners/