HAVANA, Cuba.- Celebrating the thirtieth edition of the Cuban Festival in a social context ravaged by scarcity, hunger, blackouts, lack of transportation and the mass exodus of young people, will mean fleeing forward, as they already describe some Bayamese the event to be held in Bayamo between October 17 and 20.
If, as the ethnologist Don Fernando Ortiz pointed out in his essay “The human factors of Cubanness” (1949), “it is not enough to take into account Cuba the cradle, the nation, the life and the bearing to be Cuban, since the awareness of being and the will to want to be is required”, both in Bayamo and in the rest of the country, there are few Cubans left. The rest dream of leaving, or manage, or are already Cuban-Spanish or Cuban-whatever outside and inside the country.
Few want to be Cubans if they have to reside on the Island. Only when they put the sea and many kilometers between their host countries and Cuba, the bug of nostalgia begins to make them want to return, yes, to visit, to their beloved homeland, where they spent the worst moments of their lives. But now they return with their pockets full of lies, lots of fake chains around their necks, but with the advantage of being one-eyed in the land of the blind. And the desire for someone to recognize their “successes” is usually infinite.
According to Abel Prieto, former Minister of Culture and current president of the House of the Americas, there is a category of compatriots whom he defines as “fun and rumba annexationists, because they dominate a spicy repertoire of Cubanisms, they enjoy rum, dominoes, good tobacco, strong coffee, they laugh with Pepito’s jokes, they cry with a bolero and always wear a medal from the Caridad del Cobre around their necks, but those are not Cubans, they are active practitioners of external Cubanness, but they are essentially alien to Cubanness.” They have castrated Cubanness, Prieto assures.
With these official definitions, like that of Abel Prieto, about who is Cuban or what it means to be one, I doubt the identity that the group of reveling intellectuals who meet in Bayamo during the Cuban Festivalof the relevance of the call for the 32nd edition of the theoretical event Crisol of Cuban Nationality and within this, the second Colloquium on Latin American Decolonizing Critical Thought.
I think that, if I understood what Abel Prieto said correctly, there is little left to highlight about the roots and the identity Cuban. If so, the abundant budget assigned to a patriotic event for the elected should be invested in the thousands of Bayamese who walk around the city every day in search of a crust of bread to put in their mouths, from Jabaquito to Gasolina, between Manopla and Siboney, from Remeneo to Resplandor and from Cutara to Polígono, under the inclemency of rain or sun and in the midst of frequent and prolonged blackouts.
How would I say Carlos Manuel de Cespedesthe Father of the Nation, “Poor Bayamo”. Of that town that the apostle José Martí boasted about when he said, “I have from Bayamo the intrepid and natural soul,” only the ruins remain, some streets with the name of its heroes and a National Anthem that summons a deafened population to combat. , like the rest of the country, due to fear of repression and prison.
