Havana Cuba. – Burning of dolls, buckets of water on the street, walking around the block with suitcases in hand and, without fear of generalizing, all the “ordinary people” asking that the “continuous” nightmare end once and for all, and if the letter of the year It speaks of death in its first lines, unless this is that of a regime that in its agony pushes us to agonize with it.
And beyond the same magical rituals that only worked for a few in the year that passed, nothing to indicate, to foreshadow, that change that we have had so close to but always escapes our grasp. The definitive change that we have not been able to grasp because nobody is willing to lose more than what has already been lost.
So that’s how we enter another year, and there are already more than 60, clinging to that lifeline that we invented but that, like all life preservers, barely keeps us afloat, dependent on its fragility, navigating randomly, without direction and reducing our few hopes to the possibility of ever touching solid ground, anywhere.
December passed and some of the things we feared did not happen, just as many of the things we hoped for continue not to come. Neither did the dollar rise what it threatened to rise, nor did the crowds stop queuing for food to take to the streets to ask for freedom.
The regime, adept at getting its butt out of the fire but unable to put out the fire around it, spent those few cents collected on its tour of Asia and the Caribbean on imported chicken, pork and beer, so now the question arises. It is how much it will actually cost us, in the months to come, that simulation of “abundance” that did not satisfy national hunger but that, appealing to our lethal conformism, postponed, perhaps for another summer like 2021, those predicted social outbreaks of December that some were losing sleep.
They bought so much chicken to calm the spirits of the hungry that there is talk of tons of meat lost in the warehouses of the port and in the distributors because there is no way to move or store it in the final destinations, with which our year begins with a very bad sign of what the days to come will be like, especially when many who are not them must pay for their incompetence and waste.
But, beyond the food that rots in silence, it seems that the strategy of less empty bellies, heads dizzy from alcohol and streets desolate due to fear of street assaults (so “politically convenient” at this time) worked for them, while that the brake on emigration caused by the repatriations agreed with Mexico and the United States, as well as ship sinkingmanaged to do with the price of the dollar what the Minister of Economy could not with his experiments.
However, despite the conspiracies and complicities between “friends” and “enemies”, the mass exodus, in whichever direction it is, does not end and will possibly extend during this 2023 as a clear sign of the growing unpopularity of the regime, as well as the mistrust in those former allies who are no longer trustworthy because, every time the possibility of the Finally, they do what they have to do to drive her away even more. And it is that, moral of what happened, this final battle must be fought by Cuban men and women, without waiting for the help of anyone other than ourselves, whether we live here or far away.
Gone is 2022 but that just means what it is, just that we’ve gone around the sun again. The problems have not been left behind and the questions that have not been answered will accumulate with those that are yet to be asked in 2023, reaffirming that our life is a sea of doubts, with very few certainties, with thousands of men and women leaving definitely from the native country, to the point that soon the name of Cuba on the maps will have to be written between question marks.
Will the blackouts return? Will they close Nicaragua? Will the dollar continue to set the pace for our lives condemned to the national currency? Why are there more varieties of beer in stores than medicines in pharmacies and hospitals? How many landslides will mourn our families and how many new hotels will open for the tourist who does not arrive? Will other catastrophes happen like the ones from the hotel Saratoga Y Matanzas Supertanker Base? Will they finally tell us what really happened with so many “coincidences”, “deaths” and “accidents” that 2022 left us?
2023 has arrived, and judging by the apathy of its first hours, by the man who looks for leftovers and empty cans in the garbage can, by the lady who has set the alarm for 3:00 in the morning with the illusion of being the first in line for the chicken (or whatever), for the child who ignores the Three Kings Day tradition, for the young man accustomed to skipping New Year’s Eve dinner and for the old man, excited yesterday by unfulfilled promises , and that today he no longer finds reasons to celebrate another 1st. January, for Cuba this other lap around the sun will be like the others: walking and walking to arrive, dizzy as always, at the same point over and over again.
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