Havana Cuba. – More than fear and forgetfulness, of course, envy has been the origin of many of our ills “among Cubans”. It is painful to accept it, even more to process it in our minds before the final acceptance or denial, but no one who has lived on the Island, and who has “tasted” the bitter taste of “revolutionary” populism, can say that envy is not the The motive for so much evil and misery that surrounds us, as well as one of the tools best used by the repressors to make us face each other.
a faithful reader of CubaNet I pointed it out as a comment to one of my articles and, without a doubt, he is very right. I think that not only the victims of that low passion abound here and there, but the envious ones who will always have plenty of excuses to justify and mask denunciations, betrayals, tripping and all kinds of baseness, the same after the opportunist ” performance of duty” than even a feigned naivety or a laughable “clumsiness”.
At times, by virtue of “journalistic objectivity”, I am reluctant to include it among the variables that have led to our social debacle, our drift, but, personally, every day I am more convinced that it is undoubtedly an element that we should not despise in any analysis of why something in Cuba happened like this and not otherwise, why today the Cuban ruler is this one and not that one (who today continues in “pajama plan”), even if we want to know why, despite such high popular discontent, the dictatorship is staggering but it seems that it will never end to fall.
And it is that against such an accumulation of individual envy, which drives a large part of the social and political processes that Cubans live through, all the laws and formulas that could work perfectly in restrictive realities similar to ours fail.
No matter how “basic” or “complex” the object or subject of envy is, the truth is that the system (and communism in particular) works because it offers protection and stimulates that easily contagious and impossible to correct feeling, it is more, which becomes more destructive and irrational with the years. A communist is because he envy the capital that he does not own and that he is not capable of generating, but that he swears belongs to him. This sick conflict is his raison d’être.
In this sense, going down to the base of the problem, the episode in which the neighborhood snitch-envious, as “revenge” for having seen us eat what he cannot buy, betrayed us with the Sector chief, has not been less lethal for us. for being “not very sociable” or “gentrified”, or they deny us a political endorsement to access studies or a job.
Or that other passage in our history, very sad, in which “we got excited” to throw eggs at him and hit the neighbor who decided to leave Cuba not because of his decision, but because in reality we envied his courage, his courage to tear himself away, in those years so hard, that mask that today everyone takes off, as if they were brave, when in reality they do it because doing it now has no serious consequences.
There has been a great component of envy both in those two examples and in any other that we take from everyday life, from the present.
Who removes that behind the prosperous business that the inspector closed and the police search and the confiscations is not the denunciation of the envious? More so when we intuit the existence of a pattern that reveals the selectivity of those who fall and those who survive despite the odds. And let’s not fall into talking about “luck” in a country where we know how much it costs us.
If we thoroughly review this more than half a century of dictatorship, we will find that there was and continues to be personal and “institutional” envy (or personal envy that transcended the institutional) both during the rise and fall of many “leaders”, as well as in the will to approve one economic strategy or another, a foreign businessman or another, an investment.
Because if in many cases envy has not been the main reason for leaving or entering the game, at least it has been the motive that led to “bad decisions”.
In a certain way, some of us have been direct witnesses of numerous personal confrontations, of quarrels, jealousy, gossip, mediocrities that ended in “defenestrations”, in punishments, in injustices, and even in “official notes” of the Granma where, of course, nothing is said about how and where what came to public opinion as a simple and sudden dismissal began.
Going back in time, what if not many of expropriations in the 60s? What will be some of those who are about to do under the new laws that wield the “social interest”?
How much envy was there in the intention to ridicule and marginalize those who opposed it, those who did not pay homage to the nascent dictatorship, or simply those who turned away? How many mediocre artists have managed to make themselves visible only by virtue of the political loyalty with which he disguised envy against true talent?
But also, looking at the many other sides of this false coin, how much have envy and selfishness weighed —one and the other always so hand in hand— in the dispersion of opposition movements, today most of them disjointed, diminished, distracted by their “internal conflicts”?
Because envy has done its job everywhere, in all directions, leaving us, with a perverse purpose, a battered country that cannot be saved only with money and political changes. First, before embarking on any other adventure, we must begin to change things for ourselves, without fear of correcting or acknowledging how damaged we are and even how much damage we could have done. Dictatorships fall when we begin to recognize that we ourselves are the ones who sustain and feed them precisely with our egoism.
OPINION ARTICLE
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