Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I have been thinking about “ignoring” as a response.

 Every social movement adopts its own way of dealing with the different situations it has to face. Since the beginnings of the “Revolution,” two mechanisms have been put in place and have remained constant over the years: ignoring and repressing.

We already know repression very well. It is activated suddenly in the face of any situation that threatens the stability of the system.

The other mechanism is non-response. Popular alarm bells go off over the increase in viruses and the deaths they are causing; there are no medicines, no ambulance services, no doctors in many parts of the island; there are no teachers to take on the education of our children; the imbalance between wages and the cost of living continues to grow at an unstoppable pace… but when we look to the Government, seeking a response, it feels as though we run into a tableau of smiling people gazing into infinity, into emptiness, and when they deign to address us, they seem to look at us with curiosity and say things like: “Haven’t you realized that the blockade is to blame for everything?” “Do you still not trust that the Revolution will solve everything?” “Why so much laziness when what we need to do here is resist and endure like true men and women?”

The latest chapter has been the recent popular protests—protests that have taken place in different parts of the country and continue to multiply.

However, it turns out that these demonstrations “cannot be classified as protests,” but rather as a “very brief and highly specific expression of discomfort by a handful of people upset over ‘barely’ 17 hours without electricity.”

 What’s more, they say : “no one seems to have noticed that the vast majority of the people who took to the streets were not protesting the current situation at all, but were people who went out to support the Revolution,” Apparently they were not to question the energy crisis or the state of the country in general. And those who did protest “are nothing more than lazy people with little culture of resistance.”

And to wrap up the official evasive discourse, the perfect closing line: “We are working to provide the answers the people deserve.” In other words, go back home, resist, endure, stop complaining, because in reality the situation is not that terrible and, besides, we will solve everything very soon.

 No reference to the heavy police deployment, no mention that we have spent more than 60 years building that “better future,” that idyllic, happy, prosperous country that never arrives, while the generations who await it die and pass on the same misery to their children; not a trace of truth or acknowledgment of the responsibility of those who govern us for sinking this island ever deeper into nothingness.

But let us not forget that reality is not something we create by decree. Reality is what it is, and reality speaks. And reality says that this people have spent years saying they want change; this people have spent years taking to the streets to demand their right to freedom, years expressing their discontent in a thousand possible ways.

The people have made very clear what they want, while continuing to be systematically ignored—and although that mechanism may have worked until now, I warn that it is not good, it is not good to ignore the voice of the people.