By Julio Antonio Fernandez Estrada (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Cuba is an archipelago chopped into little pieces and carried in backpacks and bags. Every person who leaves the island of Cuba or the Isle of Youth or any of the adjoining keys carries a fragment of her as a souvenir; either that, or the conviction that they must do everything possible to forget her, in order to live.
Cuba no longer has the form of a crocodile. Now that crocodile with a diamond-shaped head looks towards the north, or sometimes to the east, and other times to the south, but never content with its wetlands, its lagoons and its mangroves.
Cubans carry Cuba everywhere. They want to found an island of rhythm, Cuban salsa, dominoes, loud arguments over baseball and politics, yucca with garlic sauce, fried plantains, and diced pork, wherever they go.
But Cuba is also people in pain, without energy, with too many losses, and too many things left behind; with poverty borne on their shoulders; with numerous injustices endured; with great nostalgia for what could have been and wasn’t – and for what they believed would come but was betrayed.
But Cubans don’t only carry their joy when they emigrate – that stereotype of the Cuban character that’s imposed on our imaginations; that joy people believe we have a surplus of, along with an ability to dance and sex appeal. We travel also, or above all, with our shortcomings, our ignorance of the world, our inbred totalitarianism, our socialist understanding of the universe; with our Spanish, African, Creole, North American, Soviet cultures, and that of hard work.
Those of us who leave Cuba do so with great hunger. We want to devour cream cheese, more than one piece of chicken for lunch, a piece of meat without gristle, bread that smells and tastes like bread, gleaming grains of rice. And we especially desire to snack on something between lunch and supper, just to know we can, in order to prepare the stomach for our next hot meal.
We also have other hungers that are less evident. We carry the need for procedures that function; for an administration that treats us well; for public transit that will take us wherever we decide to go; to be able to express our opposition to official policies without inviting problems, and if we have gotten ourselves into problems, to argue it out in a court of justice, come hell or high water.
We Cubans emigrate with our extremism, our dogmatism, our Marxist-Leninism, our thousands of hours of voluntary work and days lost in useless meetings.
Cuba continues being my favorite place on the planet. With all its destruction, its going nowhere, its disorder, its dirt, its poverty, its wrinkled face, and clenched teeth, it’s my country, my place, and those are my people.
To say anything else would be a lie. I’ve never believed we were the world’s belly button. I’ve never believed we’re the funniest, the best educated, the most revolutionary, the best in so many sports, and the ones best prepared to survive in any system.
I’m maladjusted. I was educated to work in a world that doesn’t exist – that of a genuine socialism that battled with Western capitalism. I learned a philosophy – Marxism – that over half the world considers an aberration. I studied from books that aren’t used in any university. I armed myself with principles that are disadvantages in current competitive societies: straightforwardness, modesty, solidarity, neighborly love, faith in people’s good will and the conviction that socialism is a necessity in order to be free. In brief, I was built to be a citizen for international, national, and human relations that don’t exist.
Later, my own country rejected me. I’m not complaining about anything. I’m only telling the story. I describe. I’m fine, and where I want to be. But I would rather have been happy in Cuba, and not had to stop seeing my mother, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, my uncles, aunts, and friends, all without knowing when I’ll be able to see them again.
The Cuba of so many of us who’ve left – Where is it? What can we Cubans do for Cuba, other than send a monthly shopping voucher at three times the price of these goods in the countries we live in?
Can we aspire to having hope and faith of a change within Cuba? Is it honorable and honest to just let thing flow by, get on the train of the new life, invest in the country’s collapse, and try to make some money from the poverty of our people?
I can’t trade on the misery of the Cuban people. I can’t lie about the supposed liberty that the Cuban government wants potential national and foreign investors to believe will comprise a new atmosphere of Cuban business life and the future of the national economy. Now that playing at capitalism is a good thing, it’s politically correct to call on everyone to invest. But when someone thought they could sell an avocado without a license, they could be sanctioned for illicit economic activity. Some will say those things belong to other times. I say it’s just more presumption.
There’s no remedy left for us, for some of us, other than to continue working for Cuban freedom. Liberty can’t be my preferred political model, nor my learned doctrine, nor my social and individual values, nor my personal aspirations. Liberty must be an atmosphere of security, justice, legality harmony, faith in work and in the institutions, that allows life to be led in a republic without winners or losers, without tycoons or beggars, without people who give up or who are left out.
Cuba can remain with us. It will remain with us. But it must also return to being the proud crocodile of the Caribbean, not overwhelmed with its false superiority but happy with its greatness, the beauty of its culture, and its history of the struggle for freedom. That’s where Cuba must be – looking at the Caribbean and the Atlantic, with its aroma of hot beaches and bare stones, and its eyes pierced with the light of its other sea.
I can’t ask anyone to stay on in Cuba in order to found this country of the future. But I can dream that Cuba will once again become a county to which many will someday want to return.
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.
