HAVANA, Cuba. – Even having suffered more than two days of blackout and almost a week without drinking water, those of Havana can feel lucky in a country where “normality” is a luxury, and where “luxury” is reduced to having a little less of misery
Beyond the limits of the capital, in “the provinces”, in most of the Island, There are millions of people who have been without electricity for more than 100 hours and that they will support the 500 if “the system” fails again—because it will undoubtedly happen again. And that awareness of knowing that they are condemned, abandoned, excluded from the small “luxuries” that only the “lucky” find by digging through misery, has been annihilating their hope and installing resignation in the empty space that that one left.
Some are no longer asking for a light that comes to stay but just to return to those days of “scheduled blackouts”, prior to this general blackout that seems to have been deliberately caused by a perverse regime, that is, with the purpose of making them long for those “dream” days. ” in which they saw the light bulbs and the fan in the house turn on only a couple of hours in the early morning.
“Better 15 hours of blackout than permanent darkness,” some say and many repeat, demonstrating not only the astonishing capacity for adaptation that the true cowards in this story have but also how quickly yesterday’s unrest turns into “tranquility” today.
The hours of darkness that two weeks ago caused them anger and frustration, today they think of as a relief, a blessing, and that is because in those longings for a better immediate past (better only because the present is worse) they have been trained by that regime of manipulators, “mentalists”, who will know nothing about how to produce food or how to attract tourists to their hotels but will know a lot about how to make our minds yearn as good for what was only less bad.
For example, the days of the CUC, the years of scholarships in the countryside (despite child exploitation, forced labor); the toys, the beef and the Russian for the notebook; he Special Periodwhich although it left permanent consequences on the health of a few, although it killed more than one due to hunger, now in the midst of so much catastrophe and too much bungling, in the midst of another bad government but this time without a leader to follow, some remember like the apotheosis of our happy years.
Just as in the 90s, the 80s, despite “marches of the fighting people”, repudiation rallies, the Embassy of Peru and PCC congresses to become more Soviet every day than the Soviets themselves, many think like paradise lost, when in reality by the 70s it had long since been completely lost, and the majority did not realize it.
Enthralled by the verbiage of that chief who promised villas and flour from Castile to a tribe that was not even allowed cassava flour to make cassava; sleeping soundly over the trick of sending a Cuban to space when millions of us couldn’t even travel abroad; for the foolishness of being like Che when we were not even allowed to be ourselves; when being ourselves, without asking permission from the Communist Party and its political police, we continue to pay with prison.
Thus, from longing to longing, from conformism to conformism, we have reached this apocalyptic present in which the darkness and garbage everywhere would only need a few zombies to make the horror scenario perfect. And nothing is more similar to a zombie than a human being sunk in resignation, in cowardice.
Today we are not even a people. We are a surviving mass adapted to successive apocalypses that incapable mediocre people use to strip us of all hope and thus remain in power, even if that means the collapse of the electrical system as the clearest sign of the collapse of the political system.
A mass that cannot live peacefully watching and counting the oil, flour and rice ships that arrive at the port; that he no longer asks God to be happy but that Guiteras does not go out and that Felton and Renté do not leave the system; that counts the grams missing from the bread in the notebook; who sells the body to a foreigner for a “recharge” and the soul to the Devil for a parole.
Here we have all forgotten what “tranquility” is. We have replaced it with so many fears, silences, opportunisms, shocks and resignations that we no longer know what it means to live in peace.
We have lived so terrified by the “construction of socialism” all these years that true tranquility—that which no one achieves between blackouts, thirst, hunger, dengue, heat, landslides, repression and “combat orders”—terrifies us.
What tranquility do they talk about? those who threaten those who protest with jail completely right? Who are the real indecent and cowardly ones?
