PUERTO PADRE, Cuba.- Last Saturday, waiting for a flight from the United States, I was in the parking lot of the Holguín airport, under a tree, lonely, sad, sullen. The next day was my birthday and I was remembering my most loved ones – some dead and others walking the roads of the diaspora – when, out of the blue, a person approached me, obviously a foreigner, saying affably: “Hello! Well, I think I’m good physiognomist and I think I recognize him from the photograph in the book, aren’t you Méndez Castelló, the author of the novel Buccaneers?”
“Well yes, I wrote that book,” I said, and after introducing himself, the man commented: “I have wanted to communicate with you for a long time, but there is no way; The book does not have a website nor do you have social networks; I come frequently to Cuba and I wanted to ask you a ask…” “Well, now you have me in front of you, ask whatever you want,” I responded.
While the stranger was speaking, I thought that if there are reasons that do not know reason according to Pascal, the meeting with this person is one of those cases due to its historical, literary and sociological congruences, and at the same time, a proof that, on the unreason, there are also flashes of light of reason.
Buccaneer Island
the novel Buccaneers was published on Amazon on November 24, 2016, the day before the death of Fidel Castroand just eight years later, when the shadow of the deceased dictator is quickly fading and not only in Cuba but also in the regions of the world where he entered and made thousands of Cubans enter, making our country with that and many other outrages the physical and moral garbage dump that it is today, then this diligent reader challenges me with this question:
“Is it, or do you want to say in this book that Cuba is a corrupt, hypocritical nation, of pirates, of people who, showing themselves as good, are demons while those who reveal themselves as bad are, deep down, saints…?”
“Why are you asking me if you have the answer in the book? And excuse me, but I do not write about demons or saints; I try to tell stories describing people, places and events, and let me tell you something: one of the same censors of the political police confessed to me that they had used the draft of the novel as ‘study material’ in one of their circles,” I answered. , chopped And then my interlocutor replied:
“I have a doubt because in your novel you talk about prostitutes from whom you get a faithful wife, imagine; because he talks about thieves who claim to be revolutionaries, patriotic people, which is not usually very orthodox; and count of internationalist soldiers who wonder frustrated What good were all his efforts? and as the same edition says that Buccaneers It is not a political novel, although it also has those readings, so I wonder if Cuba, instead of being a socialist country, supportive as the Government and many of its people claim, is actually not a jungle where each inhabitant, as in the jungle , wears his own costume. You tell me.”
the jungle
The sting that this person’s words initially caused me disappeared. His portrait of Cuba and the Cubans It was the best in recent times, and I answered:
“You are absolutely right, Cuba is a jungle where each inhabitant, like the fauna in the jungle, wears their own costume, which allows some to mask the stalking and others to go unnoticed by the stalking. The daily life of Cubans is based on simulation, on masking, on hypocrisy, which came from the totalitarian regime and not from the citizen, who adopted it as a defense mechanism against the omnipresent State. This harmed the person more than if he had asserted his rights, because then, erroneously, some commissioner of the regime labeled the person who started out as a liar and ended up as a thief a ‘double standard’. It is wrong to say that someone has double standards, because there is only one standard; one is honest or dishonest, honest or a thief, moral or amoral; The moral person is honest, decent, because all his actions are based on the principle of good faith, while the immoral person seeks his profit over the disadvantage of his neighbor, and this is how the Cuban began by saying ‘balloons’, as they called lying. , and from there they went on to steal fuel and merchandise from the State, and then end up embezzling everything, among the Cubans themselves.”
My scrupulous reader was silent, making me say more and then I replied: “Now, you may wonder, why are Cubans like this? And I will respond with a generalization – although generalizations, because they are reductionist, are usually dangerous –: Cubans are like this out of convenience and cowardice; It is more comfortable to pretend to be than to be genuine.
And there you have the answer to your question of whether Cuba is understood as a nation of perverse people, a nation of pirates.
