Havana, Cuba. – I don’t like heroes; I have always distrusted them. Some even scare me, a lot of fear, even being aware that Plato looked at them as halftiated, if they were born from the union of a god with a deadly woman or a goddess with a man who would ever die. I don’t like heroes because in Cuba that list of Titans becomes too long, almost endless, and above all unusable. In Cuba they are sung from morning to the high and long night, and that is of no use.
It would be enough to pay a bit of attention to television, radio, any national newspaper, to agree with what I say. There is always a hero that makes feats in the countryside, a hero that meets solidarity missions around the world and leaves his children with the mother, with the husband or with a relative that is not close. Everyone shows that heroic fury that waves in the largest of the Antilles.
And the heroes, inevitably also die, They die in killings calcined by the flamesand They die in Holguin for explosions of irresponsibility and hate; And they also die at home, because the ambulance that an ambulance that gasoline did not get sick, perhaps heroic, to the hospital in which they perhaps saved his life should never lead. It matters little that the heroes of work sacrifice their days in arduous work days if medicine for your child is not in the pharmacy and neither in spiritual centers.
Heroes die every day, they die in those prisons in which they are not called heroes, where their heroicities are not recognized, where they are punished hard, until they are granted death, heroic? Those who did not even have the opportunity to make those heroicities that could make them heroes die day by day. Those who, being Christians, did not have time to make the sign of the cross or pray a Our Father. The children of Cuba die due to lack of desire to live in Cuba.
Heroes die in the sea, among sargazos, without conquering the “American dream.” Heroes die in the country, and an ironic troubadour, adjusts his abominable and bad faith speech, ensuring that there are no heroism. Heroism for what? No, there are no heroism, and there are also no hedonisms, those that could even be a little healthier than those patriotic speeches that praise the power that takes our lives. There are hedonisms for some and for others there is pain, and very bad faith, and heroes, and people who do not want to be heroes or die calcined in an explosion in which there are never those who most claim heroicities.
And what is it a hero? It is to wash your teeth after squeezing legañas and faithful. Heroism is sitting at the breakfast table and not having to think about what the son who fulfills the military service will be doing, the one who could go out in the morning to make maneuvers that can end his life. Being a hero, for a young man, is learning to seduce, and then love. Being a hero is loving, it is knowing how to hug or learn to hug, and not to prepare for military maneuvers, or rescue devices that only serve to kill.
There are no heroicities in those terrible deaths, in those violent deaths. Being a hero is not having to collect and deal with those spoils of who his litera partner was. Being a hero for a young man is going to dance, smoking hidden a cigarette without the father discovering it. Being a hero is not to be a little mart with dead flesh. The ashes are never young, the ashes are not heroic, and no order to make a dead young man into a hero will bring the comfort. It will be better not to be a hero, and above all that no military service is mandatory, or oprobious, or mortal.
