After being surprised on his property by two armed strangers who warned him that they were watching him, the author exposes another chapter of the siege and intimidation that he has suffered for years.
PUERTO PADRE, Cuba.- “Watch over us, we are also watching over you,” said one, threateningly. Suddenly, the incident occurred in my country, after one in the afternoon this Sunday, when I intercepted two marauders crossing the mountain, already close to a place for me nostalgic, the cistern that was outside my parents’ country house, where I built my cabin with the remains of that old bungalow and wrote in the first five years of this century Skeleton Island.
But my cabin of French tiles and pitch pine boards that had withstood cyclones was covertly explored by the State Securityusing a false relative and inveterate snitch, and then destroyed by vandals. Now there is nothing there, except the uncovered cistern without drinking water surrounded by trees to perpetuate the memory of my parents. Then, logically, one might ask: What were the marauders doing in a growing forest plantation with nothing in it to steal? Would they intend to destroy the precious wood trees in the same way that one day they destroyed my cabin? Or was it me they were trying to destroy, by murdering me?
Because if I only carry thoughts with me and I never carry gold or silver, any valuable object, neither pesos nor dollars nor euros, anything, then what is the motive for someone to say, “we are watching over you”?
Watching for what? Who is watching me, common criminals preparing an impossible crime—robbery that has nothing material to steal—or serving those who seek to destroy the only thing I have: the convictions of my ethical thinking?
I don’t have answers to those questions. But they do have an unraveling in the Ministry of the Interior (MININT), which has employed dozens of snitches, operational officers, criminal instructors, judges, prosecutors, jailers, prisoners, jails, administrative officials of Housing, Physical Planning, Agriculture, or, simple scammers in analogous situations, like now, to persecute me. So don’t say that there is no history of concrete danger and damage to remain on high alert. As a watcher I am today and I have always been wherever I was.
And, alert, I was alert when, standing in front of them, I said to those guys: “What are you doing here? Come out one after the other in front of me! It turns out that, avoiding the front of the land, the criminals had invaded from one side, passing the palisade just where on a dry log there is a sign warning: Private Property. There were two of them: one white, about 40 or 50 years old, a little more than medium height, with a cap and light backpack, he was armed with a wooden club – like those we have seen from municipal offices of “Culture” to candy stores and then in the hands of cheerleaders of the “rapid response brigades” – and another with light black or mulatto skin, tall, thin, quiet, who was evidently subordinated or influenced by the one with the club, was armed with a machete.
Neither of them looked like peasants, nor did they look like cart drivers or grass-cutting coachmen. They were on foot. They did not carry fishing, hunting, or logging instruments. Their appearance was that of convicts, but not that of fugitive convicts, but of confidant prisoners of operational officers, in use of license to intimidate or who knows how far they would allow those prison consents, and I perceived it this way due to their pedantry, confirming that hypothesis when they were already free of any action of mine against them within my property, far away, and while I observed them retreating along the public road, the one with the club said: “Watch over us, we We are also watching over you.”
Since those words constitute a threat made by unknown people and against me, in my own invaded land, while I was doing what few or no one does in this country today, which is the reconstruction of its native forest, I make this public complaint asking: What does the MININT have to say regarding the clarification of this crime?
I assume there will be no response. And it is not prejudging. They are the signs of criminality in Cuba with roots as deep as those of oaks, starting from the same powers of the State.
