Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I’ve been thinking about the effect of time as the years pass in my country,Cuba.

Days, months, years go by, and relentless time plunges us without pause into an apparently endless spiral. A spiral made of darkness, misery, ongoing hardship, absent freedom, and broken dreams. And we sink, unable to keep the same old question from echoing: “How long? How long can this continue? How long…?”

It has been very long: long the suffering, long the destruction, long the exhaustion. And yet, the excessive length of this nightmare may end up leaving us a great blessing: the blessing of “never again on this earth.”

Because there is no better filter than time.

If Fidel Castro had died in the Sierra Maestra, and with him the idea of the “Cuban Revolution” had died, we would very likely have come out from under Batista’s dictatorship and restored democracy, but Fidel would have remained in our minds as the great promise of a better Cuba. Today we would revere him; we would consider him little less than a saint. And at every social problem, at every injustice, at every hint of misery, we would shake our heads saying: “If Fidel hadn’t died, this wouldn’t have happened,” “If Fidel had succeeded, this country would be wonderful.”

But that’s not what happened, and Fidel had all the time in the world to show that he had the soul of a dictator and that his project would only succeed in destroying his own country down to its foundations, from its economy to its very soul.

It was different with Che Guevara, who had the luck of dying young, and although just a minimal reading of his own writings is enough to understand that he was a textbook psychopath, the fact that he didn’t have time to show it more clearly turned him into a myth—so much so that even those whom Che would have sent to concentration camps if he were alive today still hoist him as a banner.

In the 1980s, freedom was a mirage; we had far more fear than now; dissent had far more consequences than now—but there was food, there was electricity, inflation wasn’t a problem… and the plazas were packed to bursting, and many ordinary citizens defended this “Revolution” to the death and gladly took part in acts of repudiation. Those were the years when we didn’t mind our children shouting at the top of their lungs, “Pioneers for communism…!” Those were the years when exporting the model of the Cuban Revolution was a source of pride.

But there is no better filter than time, and time has spoken. It has shown that the “Revolution” was a great lie, that the lives of this people never mattered to any of our leaders, that their hand does not tremble to repress and imprison, that we die of hunger and disease before their indifferent eyes.

For this reason, perhaps the fact that this process has been so long has a meaning: that when we are free, Marxist ideology may never again exist on this earth, and that we may go from being the promoter of Marxism in the world to being the hand that, through its own experience, leads other nations toward their freedom.