We went to see Jacuzzi, a play that premiered in Cuba. The plural has nothing majestic. We were four people: Linda (my wife), Gina (our daughter, also a journalist) and Rogelio Quintana, an illustrator and painter, who escaped from Cuba and has been in Spain for more than 40 years. The fourth, of course, was me. It was a Tuesday night. The room, in the Teatro Lara, in Madrid, was bursting. The actors, Yunior García Aguilera, author of the play and representing himself, Claudia Álvarez –Susi in the play– and Yadier Fernández, Pepe in the play. All three were magnificent. They are prodigiously “natural”. So much so that they were fired with sustained applause and had to return to the stage three times.
Yunior is an idealist who wants to be friends with revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, because he does not accept the premise that there is a creature refractory ‘per se’ to the values of friendship and decency.
Nothing of jacuzzi: a simple bathtub or, as the Cubans say, “bañadera” filled with water and foam. Susi has worked abroad until she has collected an amount of money that has allowed her to buy a house in Cuba, jacuzzi including. (There is no doubt that Raúl has been better than Fidel on that end, or less stupid.) Susi has returned triumphant of her blessed works. Susi complains about the revolution in specific things: how expensive “everything” is, and especially, that it is impossible to work to improve the quality of life, “except for daddy’s children”, who have everything in their favor. Pepe is the revolutionary, son and grandson of those who have defended the “process”, and he threatens all the “worms” to act against them, but admits that the situation is desperate in the face of a reality that is irreversibly deteriorating. Yunior is an idealist who wishes to be friends with revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, because he does not accept the premise that a refractory creature exists. per se to the values of friendship and decency. He wants to be a free person and choose his friends beyond the narrowness imposed by the Revolution. However, it is Pepe who constantly asks and says “not to talk about politics anymore.” It is a declaration that the revolution imposes on him and the one that he freely admits.
There are two peak moments in the representation of Jacuzzi. One when Yunior tells Pepe that, despite the slop he must hear when he defends the Revolution and the pretended gratitude that people are supposed to feel when they talk about his “achievements”, Pepe is still the “best”. friend of his The “teques” that Pepe must have learned by heart do not matter. There is and always will be a place in Yunior’s heart to revere his friend. The second peak moment is the one that Yunior provokes when he creates Archipelago at the age of 40 in Havana, together with Dayana Prieto, his wife –a monologue evidently written outside the Island–, and develops a strategy to get Cubans to demonstrate as if Cuba were a free country. It is not. They went to his modest home and staged an “act of repudiation” in which his neighbors did not want to participate because his neighbors knew that they were a couple of decent and hard-working young people. And it is not so, that he ended up exiled in Spain, betrayed by the very people who seemed to help him, accused of being a “CIA agent”, and conspiring with Felipe González for some unspeakable thing.
Welcome to the select club of “CIA agents”. I hope that from so much crushing that infamy of the Castro regime has completely lost its effectiveness
Welcome to the select club of “CIA agents”. I hope that from so much crushing that infamy of the Castro regime has completely lost its effectiveness. Cuba is the only country in the world that gave the order in writing, in the sixties, when the Archipelago generation had not even been born, to interrupt relations with those “disaffected” by the Revolution. And the only society that dared to fulfill it. Husbands and wives who never heard from their spouses and partners again. Children who never heard from their parents again and vice versa. Brothers and friends who pretended not to see their relatives so they wouldn’t associate them. At the height of machismo, secret services that spied on the crotch of the women of the gyrfalcons to surprise them in their raids and demand that they spy on their husbands or that they get divorced. The slogan was very clear: “there was never a humming revolutionary leader.”
I hope that Yunior García Aguilera realizes that the only favor that Security has done him is to throw him out of jail and off the Island of Cuba. The regime was faced with a dilemma: kill him or exile him. They decided on the second, but before or simultaneously they would create an atmosphere of suspicion. In exile, there is no doubt, there is creative freedom. Last Tuesday Yunior demonstrated it by shaking the Cuban catharsis in a jacuzzi.
________________________
Collaborate with our work:
The team of 14ymedio He is committed to doing serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for accompanying us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time becoming a member of our newspaper. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
