Sixty-five years have passed And still the same sheet music is used for an orchestra that finds neither symphony nor harmony.
Today the world is focused on the Strait of Hormuz, back then it was the Bay of Pigs that kept us busy.
On this day, we can remember the greatest foreign policy failure of the US Administrations.
No one learned their lesson.
It would be worth remembering what happened in April 1961, and it would be necessary to do so because school textbooks do not mention it, and only a film, albeit from 2006, has recounted that event, to which I attribute no adjective.
The film is, for the record, “The Good Shepherd”.
A few other documentaries have mentioned the event, but nothing more.
It's a story that I would urge to be told today because it illustrates the rigorous standard of preparation with which the United States prepares international missions.
It was a resounding defeat for one system at the hands of another, even weaker and more fragile one.
Perhaps, and I might be pushing it with a romantic interpretation, to say that it was the story where a commercial system melted away in the face of an ideal. I say this despite never having had communist sympathies.
I won't summarise the story of the “Bay of Pigs” for you, but I invite you to read it or have it told to you; it will be useful to us today.
April 19, but of 2005 reminds us of another important date for history, also the current one.
On that day, white smoke announced to the World the election of His Holiness Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger: Benedict XVI.
A man, an ecclesial leader, a Holy Father who in every writing has foretold the next thirty years in its fragilities and opportunities.
A visionary, a prophet, a lucid and refined mind, capable of charting the course of the future like no other.
To read the current picture, we can easily use his writings; the texts produced and disseminated by him, but probably not fully understood at the time.
Today those papal speeches can serve us not only to find interpretations, but also many solutions.
A stateless person, but among states.
There is a third reason why this 19th April can and should make us reflect, and in this case, I refer to the one in 1948 in Italy.
The results of the previous day's Italian political elections are announced: the Christian Democracy obtains 48.5% of the votes and 305 seats, clearly asserting itself over the second-placed list, that of the Popular Democratic Front.
Some say that Americans influenced those elections, but in hindsight, looking back, I would rule out that interpretation, because I wouldn't credit them with the technical capability to manipulate that vote.
Surely there was a much higher design there, which guaranteed us peace and prosperity.
The majority vote for the Christian Democracy was considered a bulwark for the family, for development and therefore for reconstruction, and for peace.
Let's also re-read that vote as an element for evaluating a present that no longer has mature bipolarism, but coalitions that feed on the fragility of propaganda's muscularity.
Today, 19th April, if you didn't know what to do, you could tell yourselves elements for a present and a future that could belong to us as a valuable common good, so as to create antibodies to international “fibrillations.”.
Nicola Tavoletta
