CUBA-KUBA TOURISM : We Are Harassed by the Pale Face

We Are Harassed by the Pale Face: From the Armored Conqueror to the One in Designer Suits

There exists an image that the Indigenous peoples of North America were able to read with a clarity that official history has never wanted to acknowledge. When they named the European invader “pale face,” they were not insulting. They were diagnosing. They were describing, with a precision no academic treatise has ever surpassed, the phenomenology of power arriving on armed horses to claim as its own what had always belonged to others.

Five centuries later, the pale face is still here.

It has changed its clothes. It has changed its instruments. But the logic is the same: arrive, take, destroy what cannot be taken.

The Conqueror Has Not Died: He Has Only Changed His Suit

The conqueror arrived with armor, with cross and sword. The Inquisition was his legal department: it burned at the stake what it could not convert, tortured what it could not bend. Violence was direct, visible, proud of itself.

Today’s pale face arrives in Italian designer suits, with congressional resolutions and State Department statements. Armor is now called economic sanctions. The stake is now called blockade. The sword is now called national interest.

But the result is the same: peoples unable to buy medicine, children growing up under scarcity engineered from abroad, economies strangled not by their own incapacity but by the deliberate will of those who decide that such a people does not deserve to prosper unless it kneels.

We are harassed by the pale face. It harasses us with the spur, the saber, and the harness. Murderous cavalry, before and after.

The Pale Face Has a Name, But It Also Has Disguises

It would be far too convenient to reduce the pale face to a single figure. Yes: there is an image that, in this historical moment, concentrates the essence of the method with almost pedagogical transparency.

Donald Trump is the pale face without disguise. He is the version that dropped the mask of diplomacy and revealed the naked logic of the conqueror: you have something I want, and if you do not give it to me willingly, I will find a way to take it from you.

But it would be a mistake to look at him and fail to see those behind him, beside him, those who came before and those who will come after with more elegant suits and more polished rhetoric. The European pale face in its headquarters in Brussels, calculating which sanctions to apply to which country. The financial pale face in its offices on Wall Street or in the City of London, deciding which debt is unpayable and which economy must collapse. The technological pale face that controls the platforms where the peoples of the global South attempt to exist digitally, and that one day, by decree from Washington, simply erases them.

They all have the same face. They all share the same method.

The New Weapons: Blockades, Sanctions, and the Destruction of the Mind

The conqueror of the 21st century has learned to be more perverse: to kill slowly, and to make the victim appear responsible for its own agony.

The economic blockade is the modern Inquisition. It does not burn at the stake: it leaves hospitals without medicines, factories without spare parts, local producers without access to international markets. It kills with the same effectiveness as the sword, but with the added advantage that the executioner can wash their hands. “We are not doing anything to them,” says the pale face. “They simply don’t know how to manage themselves.”

And when the body resists—when the people do not collapse—the attack on the mind begins. The cultural industry as a weapon of war. Digital platforms designed to colonize the imagination of the young, to convince them that the only possible future is the one the pale face has designed for them: consumers, never producers; spectators, never protagonists; atomized individuals, never an organized people.

It harasses us with its elixir of prostitution. It harasses us with its way of seeing, its aesthetics, its angle, its style, its knowledge. It harasses us through synthesis, and seeks to sink our soul with the screws of a machine.

The teacher who teaches their own history is its enemy. The doctor who heals without depending on its pharmaceuticals is its enemy. The journalist who names what is happening without using its categories is its enemy. That is why the pale face fights against teachers and doctors: not because they are dangerous in the abstract, but because consciousness and health are the two most basic forms of sovereignty—and sovereignty is what the conqueror has sought to destroy from the very first day.

When Subtle War Is Not Enough: The Monster

There is a moment in the method of the pale face that reveals its most naked truth. It is the moment when subtle war—blockade, sanctions, cultural colonization, the financing of internal opposition—fails to achieve its objective. When a people, against all forecasts and all pressures, insists on existing on its own terms.

Then the monster appears.

The monster takes the form of aircraft carriers in the Caribbean. It takes the form of military bases in one hundred and fifty countries. It takes the form of a coup carried out with surgical precision in the morning, followed by a statement expressing concern for democracy in the afternoon. It takes the form of a “smart” bomb falling on civilian infrastructure and being presented on northern news broadcasts as a precision operation.

It harasses us with its monster of radioactivity, its future of sand, its colossal death.

This is not rhetoric. It is the documented history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Iran. It is the permanent threat hanging over any country that decides that its natural resources, its foreign policy, its system of government, are not for sale.

The pale face does not accept “no.” It never has. Since it arrived on these shores five centuries ago with its crosses and its arquebuses, the refusal of the other has always been interpreted as a declaration of war.

We Are the Earth, the Water, the Air, and the Fire

In the face of all this, the song that inspires these reflections does not propose resignation or hatred.

They want to take our land. They want to take our water. They want to take our air. And we will give only fire—only fire.

The land is not a metaphor. It is where we live, where we produce, where we bury our dead and where our children are born. To take it is the first act of the conqueror—and also the last he intends to carry out. Water is a resource, a right, and the argument of the wars to come. Air is the space we share, the climate we are inheriting—damaged by centuries of industrialization without consequences for those who carried it out.

And fire: not destruction, but irreducible energy. The will to exist that no blockade has ever fully extinguished. The conviction that we are our land, our air, our water, our fire—and that this is not negotiated, not surrendered, not handed over in any exchange of one for a thousand.

Until All of Us Together Put Him in His Place

The pale face lives by harassing. It needs harassment the way it needs oxygen: without it, without the constant extraction of labor, wealth, and sovereignty from others, its system cannot sustain itself. That is why it does not stop. That is why it cannot stop. Violence is its method.

But it has a limit. It always has.

That limit is us: when we stop seeing ourselves as individual victims of individual harassment and recognize the structure; when we name the method; when we understand that the one who blocks Cuba, the one who sanctions Venezuela, the one who threatens Iran, the one who finances coups in Africa, and the one who controls wheat prices in Asia are all expressions of the same conquering impulse that arrived five centuries ago on these shores believing the world was theirs.

We are harassed by the pale face that lives by harassing—until all of us together put him in his place.

To put him in his place is not revenge. It is history. It is recognizing the enemy clearly, without the euphemisms it creates to protect itself, and acting accordingly—with the unity it fears most.

The pale face, with all its artificial tan and designer suits and aircraft carriers and sanctions, is not eternal. No form of domination ever has been.

We are the land.
We are the fire.

And fire does not ask for permission.

Humberto Linares

Local Guide & Teacher in Havana

whatssap +53 52646921

Instagram: humberto_habana

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