HAVANA.- Perhaps there is one in that other dimension where the Castros and their lackeys live; but in the hard and real Cuba, suffocating and lethal, as only the nightmare that the communists turned it into can be, there are not as many boys and girls as those in El4tico or of Out of the Box. Those who have decided to stay where they were born – even when they have shown to know it perfectly in all its deep imperfections – and to grow in age and thought to build the country they dream of.
That they challenge the repressors with no other commitment than to themselves, to the future that they are trying to take away from them and that, instead of folding their arms and waiting for a miracle, they do what we Cubans need most: think and act; stimulate thought and offer by example the certainty that we are not irremediably lost as a country as long as there are young people like Ernesto Ricardo Medina and Kamil Zayas Pérez, but also dozens like them, currently in prison, in exile or under police harassment in order to silence them.
Unfortunately, the majority of young Cubans who still remain on the Island, as if stranded in the “every man for himself,” today are thinking about surviving, and the conclusion of that “fight” and that path almost always ends in the determination to leave permanently; in finding, as if it were a miracle, the opportunity to escape and save themselves from the horrible fate to which their parents and grandparents were condemned when they made the mistake of staying and believing in those same camajans who today, without fulfilling anything they promised, continue to promise better times and demand even more sacrifices. Even taking their lives by force, because the law, written and administered by themselves, allows them to do so. But, while this escape does not materialize, the acts of survival take the forms fostered by the adverse context and circumstances.
There are those who, even thinking about leaving, “adapt” or, rather, hide; those who camouflage themselves in and among the repressive forces: freeloaders, careerists, sadists, mediocre, stupid (because the fear of repression is something else) and stupid. People who would only need a “change of fortune” to see them slip away towards the North, the South, wherever, between “humanitarian paroles”, “missions” and other hypocrisies and “opportunities”, although the correct word would be “opportunisms”.
There are a few in that category of servile and hypocritical. Among them is, without a doubt, the “team “fantasy” that Castroism forms with every useful and suffocated fool that crosses its path: doctors more concerned about going on a “mission” than caring for patients; athletes desperate to appear “trustworthy” and thus manage to be included in the “official list” of some international event; artists and writers, without work and without an audience, who only find their moment of fame on the TV news when they sign the occasional statement from the UNEAC, the ICAIC, the Casa de the Americas and even Comunales, as long as it serves them as a “guarantee of reliability” behind which to hide the lack of talent, and the dictatorship as “approval” for their crimes.
Of the same “class”, without any distinction, one as complicit as the other, are also the annoying ones who knock on our doors to intimidate or beat us, to imprison us or force us into exile, to snitch and monitor us on the block like “good neighbors”, and even the cyber claria who attacks our publications not out of conviction but because that is why they gave her a telephone number and assigns her data, and if she does not dedicate the agreed upon couple of hours to the “combat in the networks”, the following month they withdraw the “benefits”.
But, fortunately, these are not all of the Cuban youth—although the dictatorship insists on presenting them as such, omitting the reasons of hypocrisy for which they are “faithful”—just as fortunately they are those hypocrisies, opportunisms and mediocrities that abound so much in Cuban society, together with the criminalization and persecution of dissent as well as everything that can be defined as independent, those who, out of feelings of aversion, boredom and necessity To change things, they still produce their opposites in greater numbers than on the side of what is “official”, what is permitted, what is legal and politically acceptable by the repressors.
“Independent” is the word most hated by Castroism. It is a concept that by itself—regardless of how much it may tend to the left or right, or whether it identifies with communism or socialism—sets off alarm bells for the political police, putting the entire system, regardless of resources or the violation of its own laws, in function of annihilating in germ that independence that, in favorable conditions, could evolve rapidly towards becoming the detonator that would cause the definitive social outbreak.
It is something that will happen, beyond wills and passions, but it is a moment that Castroism – aware that it is running out of time and opportunities, without loyal and unconditional people, without intelligence and without ideological attractions – will try to delay or disguise as much as it can, because it also knows that the power to make that final change, and decide that inevitable fall, is in the hands of the young people who manage to lose their fear and get out of the ideologically monolithic body of repression. —which they shamelessly call “unity”—, and create their own independent spaces. Whether it is thought or entrepreneurship, like gunpowder than chance and wind, these spaces are slowly introduced, grain by grain, into the small cracks of a wall to finally make it explode.
The regime saw with horror that too lethal potential in the San Isidro Movementas well as the boys who made claims to the Ministry of Culture. He feared it in those who took to the streets on July 11, 2021 and in the students who protested the ETECSA rate. In the mipymeros who have tried unsuccessfully to establish a union – and who have ended up paying with the bankruptcy of their businesses through fines and foul play – and, much earlier, in the graffiti artists, in the skaters. In the urban tribes that years ago made G Street, in Vedado, that bubble where they could be safe from so many “grinds”, and even in those private movie theaters and in the “weekly package”, whose owners and creators he persecuted as dangerous arms traffickers.
On all those occasions when we have seen the best of our young people be crushed by the repressive machinery of Castroism, most of us have not done what we have to do, which is to go out and accompany them as we would do for our children. The entire Island must have been in the streets while Kamil and Ernesto were being tried in Holguín, it must have still been fighting, demanding immediate release, but, apparently, decency and compassion are also exceptional in other generations.
Castroism understands and judges the independence of the individual as a danger, perhaps the worst of all, even more so when from those spaces that escape its control, critical thinking and experiences are constantly generated that can serve as an effective tool for the dismantling of the system or to simply begin to consider both the dismantling as a possibility or the possibilities of a dismantling of all those things that the regime intends to pass off as eternal and irrevocable.
Hence, we should not be taken by surprise by these cruelties of the political police towards the young people of El4tico and Fuera de la Caja, nor by the disproportionate offensives that will come, from now on, against other groups that they manage to identify as related, similar (in dangerousness), even when their actions and ideological projections barely converge on those only two points that make Castroism so nervous: being young and being independent.
Men and women who demonstrate how fragile the dictatorship is and how easy it would be to overthrow it if we do not all propose it, young and old. Boys and girls who dismantle the myth of lost Cuban youth and fill us with faith that there is in the newest generations a guarantee for the future, a possibility that the evil that until yesterday we believed to be permanent, can be reversed.
It is likely that in the last hours of his life the repression will become more intense, disproportionate and bloody. To a certain extent it could be a certainty, but what it really is, without any doubt, is that the dictatorship will end the same minute we Cubans decide to put an end to it.
