I have been thinking about what is essential, yet no one sees, notices or seems to understand.
The embarrassing incident that occurred this week at the United Nations General Assembly has made the news. It involved the Cuban delegation, headed by Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz. that is only one part of the equation… there are more serious things happening in Cuba that do not make the news.
On the other side of the equation there is a woman who confesses to you, lowering her eyes into the abyss, that she has had to steal in order to feed her child. And another woman who comes asking for food while telling you through her tears that she never imagined she would have to beg. And yet another who lived alone with her daughter, who had Down syndrome, and who survived on public charity. In an act of utter desperation, she took her daughter’s life and then killed herself.
On the other side are asthmatics who struggle to breathe amid the shortage of medications and despair; cancer patients without access to treatment; elderly people whose roofs cannot keep out the rain and whose stomachs are ruled by hunger. They do not make the headlines.
On the other side are two children from a village in my country town Esmeralda, nine and eleven years old, who see it as normal to make and tend a charcoal kiln in order to earn money to buy things their family cannot provide for them, without even suspecting that their childhood is slowly being extinguished.
On the other side are those who dared to raise their voices in the streets and today live in the eternal silence of prisons.
There are many people on the other side of the equation, people whom no one looks at, because when the priority is to shout louder than the adversary, it is impossible to hear the suffering of an entire people.
The sad truth is that while political agendas are being pursued before the cameras, millions of Cubans need electricity, food, medicine, freedom, and hope—needs that will not be resolved by any media victory.
Because the sad, painful truth in all of this is that the Cuban people sti do not matter to anyone.
The “Revolution” was never carried out “by the people and for the people.” That is what they sold us, but it was not true. For the “Revolution,” the people were never a priority. What hurts the most is that we all know if the embargo were to end tomorrow, the situation of the Cuban people would remain the same, or perhaps become even worse, because this government is corrupt at its core and neither wants nor is able to allow the people to prosper. Any small measure of prosperity among the people to them means a loss of power; it creates the possibility that people will become encouraged to demand their rights. Perhaps that would be the beginning of freedom, the path toward democracy—that is, the forbidden road.
The true defense of Cuba will begin when the dignity of ordinary Cubans matters more than the pride of any government, when truth is no longer considered a threat, and when the objective is no longer to produce a statistic with which to try to slap the so called “enemy“ in the face.