HAVANA, Cuba. – There will be no Christmas for the majority of Cuban households on the Island, there will be no New Year’s Eve parties because things are so expensive, salaries are extremely low and prices are excessively high. There is no electricity, there is no oil, but most of all there is no shame in the heads or bellies of those who ask for “creative resistance”, “trust” and above all “unity”, which for them and us is synonymous with more repression, more censorship, more punishment. That is why there will be a “march of the combatant people” this December 20, only because the regime wants to have an idea—no matter how clear or diffuse—of what is left of its flock.
Things are going very badly for the Communist Party and this has been the final balance of the last meeting: disenchantments, fractures and ruptures that grow within themselves at a rate even greater than the corruption, double standards, opportunism, apathy and mediocrity that has always characterized them but that has now spilled outwards uncontrollably. . Violence and drugs, vagrancy and crime, garbage dumps and pits burying streets and sidewalks are just the reflection of a crisis that is neither economic nor transitory nor surmountable but rather systemic, endemic and terminal.
But Castroism and its continuity are satisfied with knowing that even under all that “debris”, generated by them for decades, obedience and fear survive. He has not been able to verify this very well in the neighborhoods where the majority of the so-called “accountability assemblies” have very nearly ended in small acts of protest, to the point that only those where the police were notified were televised. policy with enough time for the most “problematic” to be prevented from leaving their homes.
He also wanted to check it with the “exercise against illegalities” —the one they only dared to do for a week, because if it were longer they would have had to end up closing even the Attorney General’s Office and the Comptroller’s Office— but the results have exceeded expectations and that, far from being good, is absolutely terrifying for those who had calculated a certain amount of crimes and lack of control and ended up not only discovering themselves standing in front of the mirror but also verifying that honesty, trustworthiness, fidelity, the little of them that still remained among the most naive, or was It has left, or it has died, or it has been put up for sale (preferably in dollars, or for change on the street) because that is how times go.
They want to count the sacrificial cattle with the old “grazing” method used by Fidel Castro — even though, by reviewing social networks or processing the millions of private SMS that ETECSA blocks when detecting “inappropriate” words, the magnitude of popular anger would be overwhelming. against the dictatorship—because they quickly need those images of the domesticated crowd to publish them where everyone can see them, because that gives them satisfaction and because that is what the method on “ideological work” learned in the schools of the PCC.
They have not been able (nor have they wanted to) provide electricity, water, gas, housing, safe streets, decent wages, freedoms to those who ask for them because that, according to some, was the “social pact” and the eternally postponed promise; but, instead, they offer them the only thing they are willing to give, a “low-cost” march, because although it costs them the little money they owe to the fools who lent it, they do not need to paralyze the construction of a hotel, suspend some of their trips or cancel the purchase of a handbag that matches the dress, although not with the old discourse of “austerity.”
A march in front of that embassy where almost everyone longs to enter sometime but not to protest or reproach anything, simply to ask for a visa that will let them go out to breathe fresh air, or to simply let them leave permanently because they know that they failed in the construction of socialism and then they fear that deformed monstrosity that resulted after so much experiment. They fear it for themselves and for their children, whom they have already put safely abroad under the pretext of a study scholarship, a mission, a timely marriage to some businessman, with a “personal decision” that smacks too much of hypocrisy, impudence, mockery.
The same stench that the body of the dying dictatorship exudes, and the same one that its heirs cannot shake off even if they immerse themselves in perfume to pass as businessmen in these days of “partial dollarization.” Times when being the glamorous owners of a MSME, an orchestra, a bar or a market in the heart of Vedado and not “cadres” of the PCC or soldiers like their parents and grandparents—not farmers or bricklayers—is enough for them to talk about. “changes”, of generation and mentality, when they are still prohibited from talking about the political changes that are the only ones necessary for the bad smell to leave them forever.
That is why those who sing and shout are right, those who They publish on their networks that Sandro Castro is leaving for the marchwho had his birthday in the middle of the blackout, but above all in the middle of the “exercise” that did not even touch his clothes because perhaps, more than another year of life, he celebrated knowing himself among the untouchables, among those immune to that “continuity.” that has taken lives due to hunger, due to diseases that could be treated, due to desperation that leads to suicide or the madness of escaping even at the risk of losing one’s life at sea, in the jungle or in the desert.
To the march go the revolutionary entrepreneur Sandro, and the Manuel Anido who went to look for donations to El Corte Inglés, and the Lisa Cuesta and the grandchildren and children of all of them who have enough for the plane ticket, for the VIP area of the EFE Bar once the show is over, to rent in Miami or Paris while they wait for the fall or for their parents and grandparents have just fulfilled the promises that they sang in their ears like lullabies to sleep peacefully.
