Havana Cuba. – 2023 will arrive, and if it were not for the fact that the almanac reminds us that we are in the last days of 2022, we would not find signs that another year is ending, although judging by the disaster that we contemplate around us, it seems that it is not the year but the world that comes to an end.
It seemed that the wave of deaths from the pandemictogether with the collapse of the health system and the inopportune and inhumane “economic experiments” of Marino Murillo and Alejandro Gil, had left the worst of the years for Cuban families, and that from then on any other scenario would be better, but always We forget that Murphy’s first Law warns that everything that starts badly ends worse.
And this horror novel called “Continuity”, judging by our immobility, still has several chapters to go before the blood and tears stop flowing and the credits finally begin to roll.
Thus, although we longed for tornadoes and confinements, that border closures to tourism and shortages were the most lethal ingredients of this “continuist” potion, the truth is that 2022 with the Saratoga Hotel flying through the air, the fire at the Matanzas Supertanker Baseinflation, the hurricane that devastated Pinar del Río, the blackouts, the queues, the return to the “Special Period”, the unjust sentences of peaceful protesters, the dangerous romance with Russia and the mass exodus has far exceeded any other year in horrors above, even when of those left behind, in these decades of dictatorship, none is worthy of being called “prosperous”, and even when the deep misery of these days makes us fall into the trap of thinking that sometime, before January of 1959, “we were good”.
It was not like that —although to feel better about ourselves we cling to that “mental time” where we fantasize about a “time of glory”—, not even with 2022 will all our sorrows go away. Because, contrary to what some people think, problems are never solved if our only remedy is to let time pass. And it is that things, by themselves, tend to go from bad to worse, and in that again Murphy’s laws are right.
2023 will arrive and, unlike other parts of the world where the Christmas and New Year holidays are the time to yearn for positive, radical transformations, because the conditions exist to do so, in Cuba they become another day of apathy and hopelessness in both the only and definitive change that would guarantee our well-being has not just happened, and sadder still, we have not just made it happen.
So distracted by our most basic problems we travel within this old machinery of temporary dissociations and distortions that we barely have time to understand how weak this system is that seems impossible to overthrow.
And it is that its “endurance” is sustained in something as simple as our sick will to continue being part of it, either being inside or from afar. In that “emotional dependence” that prevents us from detaching ourselves from that physical place that we call “Cuba” but that in reality are only the remains of a possibility that became extinct over time. Or rather, that we ourselves led to extinction when we did not give importance to seemingly simple things like accepting that our children swear to be like Che or the blackmail of going to march on May Day because if we don’t, they deduct it from our salary. or we lose the always humiliating “stimulation”.
Without risking guessing, with all the certainty that our bitter experience offers us, we know that 2023 will be much worse for Cuba than 2022, just as it surpassed 2021 in fatalities.
And I am not saying this just because of those queues and shortages that are already part of the national landscape, nor because we know that this enlightened December and those tons of imported chicken and pork will end up paying for them no later than January or February with the return of more blackouts. , more empty stomachs and less public transport, but because we have accepted that the only solution is to flee, but not to get out of the game definitively but to return very soon with dollars in our pockets, with which we never kill the monster of our nightmares but rather that, on the contrary, we feed it and make it stronger.
Because many who have managed to emigrate and reach their destination will feel that, far from the hell of the communist dictatorship, these last days of 2022 and possibly 2023 are the moment of their personal triumphs (and it will undoubtedly be) but they forget that if they are Thinking of returning from vacation or sending remittances, they already automatically accept the role of puppets of a regime that, I remind you, activated the escape valve not by chance or by mistake but because it wants you there, as much as it needs —so that his blackmail is perfect— that something of yours you leave here, something like family, friends, love or those fantasies that feed your vanities.
Tourism having failed or, rather, having shown how unstable an economy is when it depends one hundred percent on it, and being aware that it will never be the producer and exporter of goods and services that it claims to be, even the dreams of finding great oil fields and seeing how the commercialization of doctors abroad languishes under accusations of labor exploitation, the Cuban regime dreams of milking that great savior cow that is the thousands of emigrants, making for the first time very accurate that phrase of “turning setbacks in victory”.
Because, paradoxically, the survival of the dictatorship, dying due to lack of liquidity, is today in those who have been “defeated” by it, despite the fact that by escaping they believe they have defeated it. This is how perverse the “system” is, which only paralyzes and dies if we understand our true relationships with it.
And after what has been suffered, 2023 could be the time, if not to celebrate continuing to be alive, at least to stop and think how little we should do, almost without any effort, to get off that ancient machine and only with that make it stop.
Even now that almost all of us (those of us who live on the Island and those who have left) have moved to social networks, to cyberspace, with our real identities or with avatars, to be able to speak and exist there with the freedoms that prohibit us. In that almost inhospitable physical space that we call Cuba, we can think about the possibility of creating in this 2023 a virtual, diverse Cuba, with everything we dream of and intend to do, without having to wait for that change that does not come.
Build the Cuba dreamed of by all and that, consequently, the world is forced to recognize it even in the United Nations. Make it so big and real, so inclusive and prosperous that over the years it is the only one, the true one, the one we inhabit daily despite how far away we may be from each other.
The other Cuba, the one that appears on the maps, the one that only brings back bad memories, that one has been dying for a long time, and if we do nothing to bring it back to life, we better let it go, for the good of all.
OPINION ARTICLE
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