PUERTO PADRE, Cuba.- Poor Cuba! Dead, bloodless, all those led, taken and brought, the few still alive gagged. And in that physical mortality and mainly of values, dead the Christmas ecumenical.
Christmas is nativity, birth, Christmas Eve. It is, in countries with this culture and historical-folkloric tradition, a festival, regardless of whether people are of religious faith or atheists. It is a time of encounters, coincidences, consecrations. Yes, for some it is a very close time with Jesus Christ and his preaching, but for others not attached to the Christianitycommunion is with family, with friends, on days of food, drinks, gifts, tourist trips or staying at home. It is being yourself. Denied in Cuba.
This is what happens in a natural nation, if there were life, hope for the future and faith, understood as that conviction of the human being, faith, which is self-confidence. But Cuba is not a natural nation because Cubans are not authentically people – with very few exceptions. owners of themselves nor with more attachment to their roots than a chauvinism of “espadrilles and café con leche,” in the words of a Spanish priest who was a friend of my father.
And when there was still nation and in the nationality some espadrilles and coffee with milk – which we neither tangibly nor metaphorically possess today -, one day, back in the 60s of the last century, Fidel Castro arrived who, with cameras and microphones, had taken advantage of the Christmas Eve 1959.
On the eve of the 1970 harvest, where they were supposed to manufacture 10 million tons of sugar that were never made, he said that the Christmaswhich Cubans would already celebrate on July 26. And so in Cuba we are left without Christmas Eve and without Christmas, and by the way, now we don’t have sugar either.
Hear me, entering the most intricate part of the prison-archipelago that is Cuba, suffering confinement in dungeons of the most varied police stations, even in that of distant Manicaragua, in the foothills of the Escambrayled by gendarmes disparate in their being and doing and at very different times, with boots on I helped found Cuban Diary a whopping 15 years ago.
That task led me to report from the Zapata Swamp on December 24, 2009. There, in Soplillar, a hamlet once hidden in the mountains, Fidel Castro and his companions went, by helicopter, to celebrate Christmas Eve 1959.
In the celebration of the 50th anniversary of that Christmas Eve, with the painter Kcho at the helm, a team of enthusiasts – they roasted two large pigs in spikes that today each must cost more than 100 thousand pesos – remodeled the charcoal burners’ huts where the Castros who still They denied being communists and went to eat roast suckling pig, rice with black beans, cassava, lettuce and tomato salads, nougat from Jijona and Alicante, and to drink wine. and beers.
One of those children in 1959, now a mature man 50 years later, told me that day in 2009 (and I don’t remember now if I said it in that report for Cuban Diary), how mistakenly, instead of a Hatuey beer, he had given a malt to Fidel Castro, who told him: “I asked you for a beer, not a maltina, this is for women who have given birth.”
What “baby women” drink malt with condensed milk today…? None. Perhaps some women from the “new class”, the one that Castro-communism said it would eliminate, since theirs was a revolution “of the humble and for the humble”, when in reality, bureaucracy and corruption already corrode the powers of the State without regards. No. In Cuba in 2024 we will not have a… “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,” as our elders wrote in the Christmas cards that with allegorical images were sent by family, friends and people dedicated to business. And, more than due to lack of apples, grapes, sweets, food and drinks, we will not have a happy Christmas and a prosperous 2025 in Cuba due to lack of freedom.
