HAVANA, Cuba.- I love Almodóvar. I liked him from the first day, from our first meeting in his first film. Well, right now I’m not so sure it was the first because my memory is already in a tailspin. I also like the movie poster, I adore that foot encased in a high-heeled shoe, that photo where the heel of a woman’s shoe is the barrel of a gun, a genius, a bitch thing, really bad, really bad like that Almodóvar who came to Havana and got into the “Periquitón”, in that gay bar in western Havana where the police came and ordered to stop, and took Almodóvar to a police station.
Heels are a hard thing, a very hard thing, bitch, really bitch, and much more than those seen in some of those Almodóvar pieces. I already said that my memory is in a tailspin, so forgive me if I misremember a scene from the film or if I make it up, like the one where I still see a house in the basement, one of those that are in Madrid, and also in Havana, one of those houses that are like wells, like underground shelters where you can see the world from below, looking up, and heels and heels and heels so elegant, even when they are nothing more than the barrel of a gun .
And all this talk that I fill them with was caused by Susely Morfa, the secretary of the communist party in Matanzas, the same one we remember at that summit in Panama in which she was “summoned”, in which she was booed and criticized after she claimed that she herself had paid for the plane ticket that took her to the summit. That time in which she also affirmed that all her companions paid with her savings for the plane tickets and the stay in Panamanian hotels.
I think of Susely and I keep seeing heels and heels and heels, walking in all possible directions; the same to the east as to the west, the same to the south as to the north, that north that is, for us, always the preferred one. Susely has a ranking of nonsense that has long deserved to be in the Guinness Book of Records.
Susely is tough, tough, but don’t think in the Daddy Yankee way. She is harsh because she is ridiculous, because she appeared to pay tribute to the young people who died in the fire of the Supertankers in Matanzas, of those young people who lost their lives, with a plaster boot.
And Susely apparently intended to be at the height of communist iconography. Susely wanted to be compared to that Argentinian “shooter” from La Cabaña, to that asthmatic who was the protagonist of one of those “iconic” photos, of that photo in which she appears with an arm in a cast after a fall in the Cabaiguán takeover, in the current province of Sancti Spíritus. And I think that’s why he showed up in his plaster boot, limping, calling attention to himself in that way that communists prefer; suffering setbacks, exhibiting setbacks to immediately flaunt with the “victories”, with the “recoveries”.
Susely wants the hierarchs of the regime to see her as a self-sacrificing heroine, to put her in that pantheon of sacrifice in which some figures that became iconic in saws and barracks are exhibited. She wants to have her kinship with Melba and with Haydeé, with Celia and Vilma, and with Che Guevara. She dreams of her heroic minute of fame. She, I suppose, would also have done something similar in the Saratoga events, because there are people who can’t stand anonymity, especially when they believe that visibility will take them up another rung of power.
And it is that representing something is, as I read some time ago in Santo Tomás, “containing the similarity of the thing”. And Susely wanted the thing to be seen, the disaster to be seen, and above all to be understood from herself, through herself, and not from the specific event. Not since the disaster. Not since misfortune. She, and all of them, wanted us to pay more attention to the reactions than to the disaster, and that we prioritize the responses of the government and the party, that this government and that governing party have more prominence than the dead and the burned, much more vigilance than the pain of relatives and of Cuba.
The concrete event; the explosions, the flames, the dead, had to be displaced by the responses of the Cubans, but above all of that government of which Susely is a part. And that’s why Susely was there, at funerals and with her plaster boot, limping and not recognizing that Cuba has been walking on crutches for a long time, with her feet in plaster. Susely chose the plaster boot, so close to “sacrifice and pain”. She is a character of socialist realism. Definitely, she is more Gorky than Almodóvar.
OPINION ARTICLE
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