HAVANA.-They have taken us for idiots again. They made us believe that they really had something urgent what to say and they have even neglected the details that betray the lie, because they must be so crazy that they even forgot to lock up Arleen Rodríguez Derivet so that he would not once again make a fool of them with that clock showing six in the afternoon, when it was supposed to be 10 in the morning. Afterwards, they don’t want us to make them into memes, but it’s like they’re crying out for it.
Perhaps they even did it on purpose, as if emphasizing that they inhabit another dimension of space-time where our realities hardly coincide, and that is why the most nervous of them all spoke to the point of boredom about “resistance”, “zero option”, “blood” (he is obsessed with that). As if the last few years for ordinary Cubans, overflowing with hardships, illnesses, confinements and despair, had been the paradise enjoyed by those potbellied “vampires” of “continuity” at the expense of our remittances, our recharges, our savings, our exodus, our naiveté and our opportunism.
Díaz-Canel spoke and spoke to say nothingas usual. To pretend to control what has been out of control for years. To make us believe that there will be other Venezuelas to pimp, that Russia will do for Havana what it did not do for Caracas and cannot do for itself, that by going to “Defense Day” on Saturdays we will be well defended, that we will wait until 2050 to stop cooking with firewood, and that we have thousands of dollars left over to install solar panels on the roof of our houses and thus not depend on the national electrical system. In short, he spewed out enough crap to generate that biogas he talked about on his own, although only for the sake of talking.
On the side here it is not that we expected much, not even “something”, but the “” and the television interventions, whether in the style of Fidel Castro or the Humberto Lopezare like a trauma that, so old, is almost like a reflex action in the face of danger. Because we know that they never announce anything good, that they like to give bad news, even that time when they announced the “thaw.” They did it with the same solemn, ridiculous and scolding tone with which they denied and later accepted the “betrayal” of Alejandro Gil. Just as perhaps in a few days or months they will announce the negotiations that they persist in denying today.
However, some, as if by a miracle, waited for the grandiose and definitive thing that we have been waiting for for a long time, or at least for the denial of those “contingency” measures that the Lord had already announced the day before. Fernandez de Cossío.
Neither one thing nor the other. Nor did he bring with him solutions or alternatives. He doesn’t have them. Although he could have them if he began to seriously think about all the good he would do to the country with his withdrawal, and even more so with the dissolution of the Communist Party, with the discharge of all the military, with the release of political prisoners, with the total cessation of repression and the transformation of the repressors into guardians of democracy. Or simply by giving up lying and botching, although that would imply all of the above.
They are so liars and bunglers that even for a supposed live speech they have had to put on the usual theater. Or, rather, the circus tent even with the same clowns that they recycle again and again in their shows, as if they really believed that people believe them, and when far from receiving empathy, sympathies, adhesions, persuasions, convictions, even pity, they barely produce memes and more popular rejection.
Arleen’s clock, as far from real time as they themselves are from the reality we suffer, we would do well to take it as the sign that our time as a people has come. If Miguel Díaz-Canel has finished persuading us of anything with his absent gift of the word, it is that every minute the fall of Castroism becomes more necessary and urgent, that never before have the circumstances been so conducive for us to put aside our differences, quarrels and resentments and get to work on a definitive solution to what will never exist if we let this opportunity that has been put before us pass us by. And without having to shed a single drop of blood.
