When we talk about strengthening national identity, what do we mean? The question is not sterile. At school I learned that national symbols and heroes are part of that identity. Then I realized that it is also made up of the products of our fields and industries; the intellectual legacy of its men and women of letters, folklore, gastronomy, landscape, its art, be it music and plastic arts, architecture and, above all, its moods, which change according to the temperature, both the that arises from the weather as well as from politics.
The laziness resulting from the daily and complaining daily chore destroys the national obligation to preserve the elements that make that identity the real face of the nation; a country brand is now said. I am tired of observing, for example, that the most important of these symbols, the flag, for many lacks meaning, for which reason it is disrespected, flags in very poor condition are even hoisted in public buildings; sometimes with different shades of blue, one next to the other, in painful violation of the law that regulates their use.
In the main Metro station, at the corner of Máximo Gómez and John F. Kennedy avenues, the name of the founder of the Republic, which has been given to the place, is incomplete on one of the faces of the building, Juan P. Duarte instead of the correct Juan Pablo Duarte, without any authority or scholar of our history drawing attention to this fact, which may seem silly to many, but it is not, because he is the greatest Dominican ever born. And whenever I pass by there I ask myself: Isn’t there a Duartiano Institute? To which I say to myself later: If we send him into exile and forget him, leaving him to die in indigence; If the anthem is barely sung in schools and on the street no one stops to hear it, where did our identity remain? What is it really about?
The entrance National identity? What thing is that? was first published on newspaper the caribbean.
