HAVANA, Cuba.- Victor Hugo was right when he looked at the memory as if it were an invisible presence. And it happens that memories are always there, some active, others sedimented to later come to the surface, just at that moment in which they need to be remembered again, exposed to the memory and reason of others.
Memories are invisible, they cannot be felt or smelled, and that is why we are not capable of unraveling what the other remembers, the one who lives with us, the one we meet on the street and whom we had not seen before, but they come out, some and others, when they are provoked.
Memories come out when they are incited, when we prod them so that they sprout and are projected in words, so that they come out in speeches. And so, many times, we expose those who previously provoked those memories: memory, which almost always returns to the head, to its surface.
An allusion, a brief and barely perceptible gesture, could cause a catastrophe. Memories are sedimented, organized in such a way that at the slightest provocation they rise up, come out and are projected. Memory is very persistent, and often precise.
Memory allows itself to be provoked and there are many ways to excite it. And one of the greatest provocateurs in our memory is the government. That old government of the terrifying deceased and living makes us remember with some insistence. That old government has been provoking us for days, ever since a young student in Texas gunned down 19 children and two teachers. The student carried a rifle, a pistol, and he killed, causing innocent blood to flow, causing desperate families to cry.
They put their finger on sores that haven’t closed yet
And the Cuban government reports the event in every newscast. Television, radio and the written press echo the shooting and the deaths, but so much insistence ends up provoking our memories, and they put their finger on sores that have not yet closed. They refer to shootings, deaths, blood, weapons in the houses, impious governments, laws and amendments that they consider macabre, and they make us remember, force us to remember what is alien to us, at least distant, at least beyond our borders.
And remembering today takes us to the tugboat March 13, and to that fateful July 13. All 13; and it even seems that everything was the fault of such a number, of that same thirteen of the thirteen lunar phases for the Mayans, that thirteen of the bad omen for the Jews, of that day in which thirteen men sat at the table in what was It was called, it is still called, The Last Supper, that supper in which one of those seated at the table with Jesus died; but still I don’t think that in this case the number 13 in the ship’s name should be attended to, because what happened then had nothing to do with chance.
The dead of Fidel Castro
What then happened was wickedness, the villainy of an angry and murderous man, the perversity of a madman, or the insanity of a wicked man. That day Fidel Castro gave the order to kill, to punish deserters from his government. That July 13, a tugboat sank that was reminiscent of a March 13 “revolutionary commemoration”, that March 13 of the assault on the Presidential Palace. Fidel Castro sank the lives of children in a sea that he also believed he ruled.
Fidel got, that time, the balance of forty-one deaths, including ten children. The school killer in Texas claimed the lives of 21 people. Fidel Castro is guilty of mass deaths and suicides, even after his own death. That dictatorship that he founded continues to leave mortal victims, many victims, countless deaths, such as that of Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, who was killed by the police in La Güinera for demonstrating during the days of July 11 and 12, and who made his mother, who could not bear so much suffering, would later commit suicide. There is undoubtedly some difference, however brief and slight, between the young Texas killer and the old Cuban killers, and any comparison is inappropriate.
OPINION ARTICLE
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