HAVANA, Cuba – They say slugs need snails and humid climates to survive, they say they prefer tropical temperatures of all kinds, and they can be seen in flocks in warm areas, and also in the northwest Pacific Ocean. They say they are pests and they cause harm.
Many things are said about these slugs and their “snail houses”; and if I mention them now it is because I have seen a man who reminded me of snails and slugs. I have seen a man who carries his “house” with him every day wherever he goes, but unlike the slugs he does not have a snail. That man’s roof is the sky and nothing else.
His bed, which the man also needs, is an old, rickety mattress filled with wadding that he spreads out at night on a bench in the Central Park from the capital of the Cubans, and very close to Martí who stands on his high pedestal.
The man only has a park bench, a bench and his rickety mattress that he only spreads out at night, when the police siege lessens, but even so he has had to deal with the vileness of the police who demand that he go sleep somewhere else, even though they know that he has “nowhere else.”
And the unhappy man says that the police say much more. The homeless man says that a policeman once pointed out to him that sleeping outdoors was “a counterrevolutionary act”, “a bad image that tarnished the greatness of the Revolution”.
“What will the tourists say? What will the enemies of the Revolution say?” “That is the concern that torments the guilty,” said the man, who cried when I asked him about his family and did not answer me; he only made a sign for me to accompany him. The man wanted me to see the changing room that allowed a certain privacy to the fifteen-year-old girl who was changing clothes so that the photographer could press the shutter of her camera in the most central park.
The “beggar” pointed to the dressing room and said he would settle for one like that to get some privacy; the photographer and the photographed looked at us with disdain after each intervention of the shutter. A well-dressed young woman and a beggar became the centre of my attention, while the gazes of the passers-by also went from the dressed-up fifteen-year-old to the beggar.
And so we became the visual universe of all the walkers who walked through the park. Two very distant worlds, two very distant gazes. The gaze exercising the freedom to face good and also evil.
The gaze that is sensitivity, the gaze that can be transcendent and that goes far beyond what is easily visible. The gaze that is emotion, that is a perceptible state of mind. The gaze as a transmitter of emotions. The gaze that reveals our connections with the world.
And the gaze in the most central of Havana parks can become dangerous for those in power, especially if those gazes lead us to judge who is responsible for a man being more unprotected than that slug that has a snail as protection that guards and protects it.
The gaze is a crucial act. The gaze captures the unprotected man who carries on his back the mattress that shelters his body in the helplessness of the Havana nights. The gaze is interaction with what surrounds us. The gaze, they say, collects data that later become impressions and clarify the realities of the environment, and perhaps that is why the communists propose to manage our gazes.
And it matters little that the unfortunate man lives and dies lying on that bench in Central Park, what matters is that his misery, the filth of the beggar, is not perceived. The gaze would allow the truth to be revealed, and the communists prefer to draw the curtains. The gaze opens the doors of truth and reveals its essence; and that is counterproductive.
OPINION ARTICLE
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