Havana Cuba. – In Cuba there is a queue more massive and desperate than those for chicken, oil, CADECA dollars, gasoline in the CUPET and shifts to the hospital.
This other one is so immense that no photographer, no matter how good his lens is and how wide the frame is, manages to show it to us in a single image. It is impossible to do it. Unless you try it by pieces, by scattered fragments, of that great queue that even without moving from our houses we begin to do from the minute we become aware of the alley with very few exits in which we are born, when we do it in Cuba.
It is the queue to leave the thousand and one ways in which we Cubans leave, even when we do not leave completely and accept that game of simulations of going back and forth, just to “take a breather.”
But at the end of the day, even if we insist that it is not, it will always be the queue to emigrate, to give up and accept that there is no other viable solution for our lives and those of our loved ones other than giving up —by dint of disappointments and repressions—to live in the country where we were born to start from scratch anywhere else.
There is no talk of anything else in Cuba. All our conversations begin and end there when we exhale, in the form of a cry or a sigh, as if it were part of our breathing, that desire to “get out”, to “get out”, as we say here when the word “emigrate” doesn’t work to describe our boredom.
Even when we talk about any other topic or when we don’t even open our mouths, in the loneliest of silences, we end up thinking (or dreaming) of running away under the influence of that feeling of not doing what we should do. Of being fatally “dizzy”.
With each passing day, the more toxic and uninhabitable our environment becomes, the feeling grows among us that the country is divided between the winner who has left, the one who leaves, and the loser who stays, who “adapts ”, who conforms or resigns. Between those who manage to escape and those who have been trapped in all those thousands of things with which we ourselves build the walls of this prison, which without a doubt it is.
But they are things like fear and courage, ingenuity and clarity, utopias and pragmatism, sentimentality and cold blood, money and empty pockets, too much or too little faith in our abilities, our madness and our sanity. the ones that make us choose to leave or stay.
If no one is reckless in staying in Cuba, neither is he in doing the opposite. There is no value in leaving, nor in staying. It all depends on why we do it and if it comforts us.
If there is something “bad” or “good” in the very personal decision we make, it would be in denying others the freedom to make their own decisions, in judging them for taking one path or another, for following or not following the advice of an experience. better than the other.
During these days of mass exodus and “political coming out,” I have read conflicting opinions from Cuban men and women who face each other, sometimes with too much hatred, because of their differences about what would be best for Cuba.
People who think they are superior or more cunning because they choose this or that. Discussions that lead nowhere and that keep us “entertained” without being able to see that a long time ago that country from which we moved away or in which we remain ceased to exist, they annihilated it, and now Cuba is only that personal country that each one of us bears within, for which we fight or cross our arms. That is the harsh reality.
Our history, full of vicissitudes, has brought us to this point where, in order to survive as Cubans, we have been forced to carry our country and take it with us everywhere.
Even though we live in this piece of land that we geographically know as “Cuba” —under a regime that tries to impose on us by force that other usurped, distorted, twisted “Cuba” from which we today seek to escape—, inside our homes, and Exclusively for us, our personal country always exists, free from ideologies and political opportunism.
Fortunately, now that Cuba lives scattered around the world, enriching itself from other realities and experiences, from other joys and sorrows, from fortunes and misfortunes, we have, like any wandering nation that was never forgotten by its own, in the diaspora, the opportunity of proposing ourselves for the good of all to unite that diverse country into one, without divisions from “inside” or “outside”.
Because there is no room for hatred and revenge if we really want to recover a physical country that today is, exists, only because of the fragments that each one carries with oneself. We are all in this queue that no one can photograph “full body”, and some will have their turn while others have to wait.
Others will fall asleep, yes, or when exhausted they will go home empty-handed, but unlike the tails of chicken, oil and gasoline, in this one among ordinary Cubans, it is not about winning or winning, just about taking our place, the one we choose or the one that touches us, and without seeing ourselves as enemies, thinking that we are not it is not just the queue to “get out”, but to start from inside and outside, together, to build the country that a dictatorship has taken from us.
OPINION ARTICLE
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