Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I have been thinking about the long road to freedom.

There are moments when it becomes difficult to hold on to hope, moments when evil seems to dominate the present and control the future.

It feels as though we have fallen into an infinite and eternal hole. We live in a collapsed country, with a stagnant economy and endless blackouts that spread a lack of energy to the soul—a country where nothing progresses, nothing flourishes, and people wear themselves out waiting for a solution that never comes.

We move between the hope of a forced change and the doubt of whether anyone will truly help us get out of this swamp.

It seems that nothing is happening, it seems that we are condemned, but we cannot forget that there is no eternal yoke or unbreakable oppression, and that, whichever path it takes, freedom always seeks the road to change.

As George Orwell once said: “All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.”

And only through the use of force, repression, and fear can our dictatorship remain standing, because the fraud has been exposed; the lie of a Revolution “of the people and for the people” can no longer be sustained. We now know that the Revolution came only to subjugate this people, to create an island of slaves for the benefit of an elite that does not care about us.

That is why, sooner or later, this dictatorship will fall. The stagnation in which we live prolongs the agony of our people, but at the same time it fuels the imperishable longing for freedom—the longing that makes each person, from his or her own place, continue fighting, continue betting on the end of this evil that has become indifferent to the miserable and precarious life of our people, because we know that freedom is the only possible homeland.

 Let us not forget the lessons of history. Adolf Hitler seemed unbeatable, communism in Eastern Europe proclaimed itself eternal, and apartheid seemed as though it would outlive Nelson Mandela. Rafael Trujillo, Alfredo Stroessner, Manuel Noriega, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, François Duvalier… all seemed immovable, all came to believe that the systems they had built would live forever, but today they are all history, belonging to a past that speaks of defeat, popular rejection, and a nightmare brought to an end.

An authority may subjugate, but that does not mean it has triumphed. When illusion dies in the heart of a people, when what was once victory turns into submission, that people may pretend obedience, may protect themselves in order to survive, but for the oppressor there will no longer be a future—and that, we all know.

That is why, at this moment, silence is not an option. Sitting back and doing nothing while waiting for others to take initiative is not an option. We have endured too much, and it makes no sense to keep dying while shouting slogans.