HAVANA, Cuba. – The massacre in Ciego de Avila I wish it were the highest peak in the current escalation of violence, but if things continue as they are, we could soon witness episodes of horror in Cuba that surpass that of Ceballos, where a young man thought that the lives of a child, a teenager and two women were worthless compared to his miserable desire to appropriate what belonged to others.
There are those who wonder what “valuable” things the murderer intended to steal from that house, as if in some way the magnitude of the robbery could justify the monstrous dimensions of the bloodbath, and the simple fact that our mind, consciously or “unconsciously,” diverts us to such details in the face of the violent death of innocents, is an alarm signal to stop and reflect on the society of which we are a part, on the many “monsters” we carry within and, more urgently, on the growing “normalization” of violence in a context of “every man for himself.”
A context that is a “continuity” of that other one of “socialism or death” where we were taught that life has no value, that it does not belong to us, in contrast to the whims and selfishness of some handsome guys who govern a country, just as the gang leader terrorizes the neighbors in the neighborhood.
I have written about this subject before.and I will return this time because I am still concerned about what I see daily not on social networks, where we barely manage to see the tip of the icebergbut in my own “marginal” neighborhood, as well as in the entire “marginal” city where I live, the country marginalized from one end to the other, where the common denominator in the relationships between people, even between the Government and us “governed” (not to say subjected), is violence.
A violence that could become irreversible or very difficult to reverse if it is thought of as something “conjunctural” (or as something that “happens in all societies”, as I have read from some “cyber-claires”) and not as an element of “adaptation”, of “survival”, which has been installed in us as “natural” due to the sustained institutional and police indifference, in a political system that has systematically used it against anyone who confronts it.
And what are they if not the “acts of repudiation”the “Rapid Response Brigades” or knocking on our doors to “advise” us to shut our mouths because “there will be consequences”?
How much responsibility is there in a system that invests all its “police” resources in “investigating” and suppressing the slightest outbreak of dissent, even criminalizing it, while ignoring the true criminality that it does not recognize as dangerous since its objective is not political change?
A young man has ended the lives of four people because he understood that this is how “easy” it is to get the things you want. All those delinquents and criminals who we have heard about in recent months have thought in a similar way, for the theft of a motorcycle, a cell phone, a horse-drawn cart, a farm animal, and even for the price of cheap rum from a disgusting drunk.
For some the problem is in the economic crisisthe state of general misery, and although there is reason in what they argue, they do not delve into the true, underlying causes, which undoubtedly point to the forced manufacture of that “new man” of Castroism, which in practice became more of hatred, envy, revenge, vulgarity, discrimination, violence, laziness and mediocrity than of those “revolutionary” materials of the formula written in the official discourse.
A “system” that, both in the beginning and now in the “ends”, has wanted to “educate” and “re-educate” with blood and fire (just remember those forced labor camps called UMAP for which none of its “creators” has yet asked for forgiveness from its many victims), and a “system” that, just like in blows, takes away property from its owners, snatches away our savings, makes “legal” and “illegal” tricks to break promises, and all to “build” that “dream of society” that, seeing how they flee with words and without wordsnot even they themselves want.
Thus, there is no great difference between the murderer who does not hesitate to kill to achieve his “dreams” and the “system” that starves 1,000 citizens to feed a single tourist, or the “system” that instills in our minds that anyone who does not serve our purposes is the enemy, and the enemy must be annihilated.
I am not using this issue to “politicize” it, as some will say, but I insist once again because it is essential to understand that there will be no solution to the violence in our streets and neighborhoods if we do not end the political violence that we have assumed to be “normal,” just as we labeled as an “innocent act” the desire to lynch those who emigrated in the 1980s because the regime called them “worms,” and then it was “normal” to crush them.
It doesn’t matter that now there will be “exemplary” trials, or that capital punishment will even be reintroduced. Perhaps the bloodshed will stop for a while, but the basic violence will continue as it is and our society will become not a “better society” but merely a dormant volcano. And volcanoes don’t “sleep”, it’s just a metaphor to make us forget the catastrophe that will erupt when everything hidden inside the mountain comes to the surface.
