Numbers can be symbolic and literal.

252 to 161. 52 to 44. $1.2 billion to $800 million.

Because we are mortal, moral and thus beautiful, every little bit – and byte – of human knowledge, every fact and figure, is simultaneously steeped in myth and feeling.

50 states. 13 colonies. Four score and seven years ago…

This year we were to celebrate the 250th anniversary of a promise, a commitment, whose first sentence contains the curious phrase:

to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them

Their phrasing was meant to convey humility. But humility is not an easy stance; it requires assiduous study and, perhaps, some intelligence. In other words, the more willfully ignorant, the more proud; and vice versa.

Today I found the following on my LinkedIn:

For some 40 years I have been aware of being a Cuban American, a phrase as overdetermined as “human rights”.

In the last 10 years, as America succumbed to authoritarianism, I’ve found much wisdom in the affairs of the Cuban peoples.

Long before the escalator ride of 2015, by which the world descended into a distinctly American purgatory, the Cuban people had committed themselves, fully, to cults of personalities.

Before Fidel there was Batista, before the lie of “venceremos” there was the no less odious lie of our national anthem which proclaims, against all that is good in humanity, that “dying for one’s country is living.”

(Note here the recent protest slogan of Cubans who, you know, actually live in Cuba: “patria y vida”: life AND country.)

As you, my dear readers will recall, what little I know I attribute to the fortune of having been born in Havana, of being displaced and dispossessed. Of choosing democracy. Ours is a story of failure. An important lesson but one that requires humility to absorb.

Again, the signatories tell us:

all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed

So while I am not surprised to find cultists like Dariel Fernandez in the wild – we all cast a shadow – they are nonetheless a shocking tragedy to me.

Imagine being gifted the patrimony of a failed democracy, the legacy of decades upon decades of human rights abuses and declaring, with your full chest, on Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn.com that this is your avatar:

History will not absolve him. For now, you can read contemporaneous accounts:

NBC News: Bukele offers to jail US deportees, Rubio announces

FRONTLINE: The “secret” behind Bukele and Trump’s CECOT deal

HRW: “You Have Arrived in Hell”

Again, we are moral because we are mortal. But we choose to be blind or to see - to borrow a phrase from the clergyman John Newton.

The same slaver-turned-abolitionist concludes his ode to repentance thusly:

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call'd me here below,
Will be for ever mine.

It’s never too late to repent, as they say. But more than a few of our fellow tripulantes would rather go down with the ship. What vanity. What pride. Bless their hearts.