Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I’ve been thinking about realities that make me think. This reality I am living is happening after 60 plus years of communism in Cuba.

 Ever since we made the mistake of letting ourselves be seduced by the word “Revolution,” we have learned to live with countless situations: scarcity, hunger, helplessness, repression, fear, frustration…

We have become experts at adapting to everything, and maybe that is why now we are learning so easily to live with death.

We are dying. Cuba has become an island of rotting streets, where garbage piles up shamelessly, and from those filthy streets a multitude of diseases—so avoidable and yet so transmissible—has spread. Dengue, Zika, chikungunya, arboviruses… what does it matter? But the reality is this: people are dying, many people are dying, in silence, in anonymity, under our impotent gaze—already accustomed to everything—and also under the apathy and inaction of a Government that takes care only of itself, a Government that has nothing to offer and no longer cares to offer anything.

And I think: how have we allowed our souls to be emptied so much that not even death itself pushes us to look for a definitive way out of this nightmare? How can we accept with such passivity the suffering of those we love—those we see suffering before our eyes because they do not even have a basic pain reliever? How can we so calmly accept the death of our loved ones while we wait for a solution from those who neither can nor care to provide one?

And I think: how can we bury those who have died because of the inefficiency and incompetence of a political system, and still support that system—participating in every march and rally it calls, and enthusiastically applauding every empty speech? When did we become a nation of zombies?

And I think: what more do those who govern us want from this people? Is it money, the absurd feeling of exercising power, guaranteeing the life of an elite for generations to come, the sick pleasure of leaning out a window and thinking: “all of this is mine”? Is it a darkening of the soul to a level where humanity is no longer possible? What more do they want from this people? Why this determination to make our lives increasingly miserable? Why don’t they just leave forever and let us build a different history?

And I think: how is it possible that this sentence has lasted so long? Could it be that Cuba is truly destined to one day become that “beacon and guide” so often spoken of, but in order to remind its children never again to allow another dictatorship on this soil; to remind other peoples that whatever name one chooses to give to this—communism, socialism, the left… I don’t care—it only brings repression and misery; perhaps to stop being one day the axis of evil that has poisoned the souls of so many peoples, of so many young people, of so many universities, and to become instead a tireless fighter for freedom and truth?

I think and think, and the thoughts crowd in, while around me some struggle to survive… others die.