Monica’s daughter studies piano and will not go to school on Monday. Raudel has planned to miss work and his sister plans to hang a sheet on the balcony, while Maykol and his grandmother already have their white clothes ready to go out on the streets. Everyone prepares, in one way or another, to the Civic March of November 15, a call to which no one is alien on this Island.
The Cuban streets, so overturned in daily complaints, have begun to speak in a different way since last July 11 a crowd ran through them shouting for freedom. It is as if after that day the script of the conversation that had starred in the queues, markets and bus stops for decades could not have been recovered. The poor quality of the bread, the heat and the soap opera took a back seat.
Nobody is surprised when another mentions the call to demonstrate, everyone seems aware. The public discussions do not even go by the false dichotomy that the national media tries to show among those who summon go out to the streets to demand respect for human rights and those who still feel identified with the official discourse. The dilemma is another: how to protest, what is the best way to join # 15NCuba.
The official arguments of the conspiracy orchestrated from outside the borders hardly penetrate the spontaneous street conversations and, when they appear, they are met with ridicule
From the most daring gesture to the most timid. From those who feel that they no longer have anything to lose and will put their bodies on the avenues to the retired lady who will not be able to leave the prostrate mother alone but will place the only two white covers she has left on the clothesline. From the father who has warned his children that they will not go to school that day to avoid being used as shock troops to the young girl who will play the pot on the roof of her house at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Never before, an independent convocation had so penetrated the national soul. The reason for this extension of the call is not only in the feeling of suffocation that this failed economic political model has spread among Cubans, but in the campaign of shooting reputation that the television and newspapers controlled by the Communist Party have carried out against the initiative and its main promoters. By demonizing them they have made them more attractive.
Even among those who fear that day the most, because they have a son in the Military Service who will be used to repress the protesters, or they cannot miss their working day even if they put them on a bus with a stick in their hands, the feeling is final. They know that the system is in agony and that now it is only possible to stand on the side of those who will help the birth of the new creature that the Nation needs or those who will artificially beat the frayed heart of the regime.
The official arguments Of the conspiracy orchestrated from outside the borders, they hardly penetrate spontaneous street conversations and, when they appear, they are greeted with mockery, half-face smiles and an avalanche of responses that leave the promoter of these justifications at a frank disadvantage in the eyes of the majority. The discourse of victimhood was exhausted; people no longer serve these bizarre plots.
The civic march has served part of its purposes by making the Cuban authorities have to show their own face
Fears and doubts about the future are flying over all the family tables, but conviction springs from that mixture of apprehensions that has kept millions of Cubans awake. It’s now or never. Castroism is wounded, crossed from side to side, and the blow is fatal. The Civic March has fulfilled part of its purposes by making the Cuban authorities have to show their own face, a face that many of us already knew for having suffered directly from the repression but which they skillfully masked with the rouge of social justice, sovereignty and Equality for all.
That layer of cosmetics is also used to make us believe that they can do anything, that they have every millimeter of Cuban soil under control, that they will viciously chase the retired woman with the white covers on the balcony, the young woman who hits a pot on the roof of their home and the father who will not allow his children to go to school so that they do not use it in the Rapid Response Brigades. They want us to believe that they have time for that.
In November 1989, the Germans brought down the Berlin Wall. The Soviet bear was not amused by this boldness, but he had many other concerns. That same month, a general strike paralyzed Prague and accelerated the fall of the communist regime, thus breaking another link in the chain that, controlled from the Kremlin, was trying to hold the socialist bloc together by force.
The Plaza of the Revolution is no fiercer than the Soviet Union, which, because it had, even had nuclear weapons; not even State security Cuban works more efficiently than the German Stasi, imbued with a discipline and tenacity rarely seen on this island. If both grotesque creatures no longer exist, why believe that Castroism will last forever. Will your tombstone also take a November as a month of farewell? It depends on us.
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