HAVANA, Cuba.- It is not a day like any other. And it will never be again as long as we continue to live in a dictatorship. That 11J of burning streets is over and it may not happen again for a long time, but we will always wait for something this shocking to happen again.
There has been too much jail between that 11J and this one. Too many rigged prosecutions, excessive threats, outrages, violence by thugs, media manipulation but also, on the side of reason and the desire for freedom, we have plenty of untimely, unexpected surrenders, betrayals, of “leaders” fleeing “from the hot” under pressure but also because of cowardice, opportunism, because of the shamelessness of agreeing with the opposite, putting at risk what does not belong to them and which is the freedom of a nation.
We are millions of Cuban men and women longing for a political change but, like those who await the happy ending of a comedy in front of his television, we are still millions of passive spectators, observing the brave as we do with the actors when they play a role, like caricatures coming from the mind and the stroke of an artist, as if the heroes of flesh and blood bone that the regime defames in its propaganda media did not have a dignified life and of human beings like you and me beyond the “good” and “bad” news on the Internet.
11J is not a day like any other, it is true, but only because, unlike the other 364 of the year, in this one, in an absurd way, some have put their faith just as they put apathy and immobility in the previous days and in those who will come as if 24 hours of expectations were enough to bring down more than half a century of repression.
It is true that the Internet and social networks have given us the opportunity to express ourselves freely, the one we were waiting for when, at gunpoint from Soviet weapons, it was not possible to take to the streets.
But it is also the Internet, together with our “natural” foolishness, that has planted in our minds the illusion that “virtual” rebellion would suffice to achieve real change; that with just a “hard day” of viral labels, memes and “cyber combats” it is possible to surrender to those who make the law and cheat, those who spend more money on patrol cars than on ambulances, more on anti-riot equipment than on food and medicine.
Faith is not a matter of praying for a single day and sitting around waiting for miracles. Faith is persevering and acting all the time of our lives. Do not sit idly by waiting for an opportunity that has a date and time set in advance because no battle plan revealed to the enemy will end in victory.
Longing is not enough for the things we think to come true. It is not enough to check Facebook looking for the viral video of a small street outburst in order to reduce our rebelliousness and accumulated energy for so long to a “like”, a comment, an accompaniment from a distance, a hashtag.
Both on one side and the other on the battlefield we are waiting for something spontaneous and definitive to happen but cowardice dominates us as much as the desire that it be the other and not one who throws the first stone.
It is true that yesterday (J11), unlike previous days, I have come to feel much more the fear and tension that, like unbreathable gas, always envelops us on this island of forced confinement. A stench that at times seems lethal, but also that could definitely cure us like some poisonous substances do when we take them in excess.
But yesterday, in the comments of the neighbors and people on the street, I could only perceive that discouragement born of fear and that even thins the air inside the family home.
A dense toxic fog that, no matter how hard we try, we cannot dissipate even with the thousand tons of indifference that we exhale daily, precisely because it feeds on it.
The best thing about this day, about this other 11J in which nobody did anything despite the fact that many wanted to do it, is that precisely in those desires for freedom that are increasingly stronger, although more repressed, we have seen, perhaps for the first time in a long time , that the end of the dictatorship is very close. Because that’s how pressure cookers explode when their exhaust valves get stuck.
OPINION ARTICLE
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