HAVANA, Cuba.- “We have to hold on until we can leave. This here is provisional.” I have always heard it from some friends who are not “official” but for some time now I have heard it from people who, deeply or opportunistically “committed” to the regime, had advised me to “soften” my political opinions “for my own good.” . Now we could say that the state of “provisionality”, the certainty that Cuba is a place that must be abandoned no matter what, is an idea fixed in the minds of Cubans, and probably the most dangerous because it leaves no hope. for those who still dream of a country free of dictatorships to which they can return definitively. The provisional nature is devastating and its effects are visible everywhere.
It is not difficult to find people of different ages anywhere talking about their idea of the future in which Cuba is simply the place where by a disastrous coincidence they were born and where they have to leave as soon as possible. Now, unlike a decade ago, there are not even traces of doubts and everything is certain that what held back previous generations, hopeful by the idea of a possible change in the relations between political power and citizens, is over.
What has been seen and heard in recent weeks, as a result of the protests, confirms that the government is willing not only to repeat the same errors and excesses but also to reinforce its perversity, precisely by virtue of that provisionality that no longer “invades” us. , as we thought a few years ago, but now our thoughts have “colonized”.
Alarmed by the constant failures of a system that ruined the dreams of parents and grandparents, there are not many who are betting on permanence in the national space that requires so much commitment in exchange for a personal development full of limits and that would force them all the time. life to adopt strategies of masking, of pure survival, which turns one’s environment into a zone of repression and self-repression, of constant tensions between wanting to be and the impossibility, between desire and convenience, all of this together with devastating certainty. of moving towards nowhere.
Born from other similar feelings such as disenchantment, hopelessness and apathy, provisionality is part of one of the many maneuvers of passive resistance and adaptability to that system with which one publicly or privately disagrees.
The already common phrases heard in the mouths of almost everyone such as: “when I leave”, “the day I manage to leave this country”, “it will be different outside”, “here in Cuba you can’t…”, “Oh, mijo, this is Cuba…”, “you have to leave to achieve it”, join the similar exhortations of those who are aging and who are convinced that there is no solution to Cuba’s problems as long as ideological commitment and official stubbornness prevail over sense. common, curbing the political and economic freedoms of citizens.
Those who have been invaded by the feeling of provisionality can only see a perspective of personal or family change in the renunciation of living in the space where they were born, as an escape or act of salvation.
It shocks me to see how widespread these attitudes have become, but it worries me much more that it is not an option, but the only response to cornering. Because it is not about choosing between a “supervised” agency and the freedoms that they sense in another place beyond the seas, but about evading prolonged and useless confinement, protected by that possibility of betting that has been denied to them under pretexts of all kinds. Possibility, let us be clear, that represents the occurrence of a true economic miracle in their lives.
If before the provisional nature consisted of leaving alone for a time, with the expectation of a return as a result of a favorable political change, now the feeling becomes definitive, quite radical in some people who, when they see the doors of the country closing behind them , they know that a period of sentence has ended and that it is time to bury the past a thousand meters underground and, perhaps, re-emerge as a human being and not as a piece or guinea pig of a failed social experiment of which they do not foresee the end.
On the one hand, the natal space is the place invaded by “it’s not possible”, “don’t say that”, “you better shut up”, “don’t fight”, “not now”; Impossibility shapes the contours of our personal space to the point that individuality is distorted into submission and our place of personal fulfillment moves far away, it is postponed.
A good part of Cubans sense this reality and, as they renounce, out of fear or opportunism, their right to rebel against injustice, to disobedience, they provisionalize everything that exists in that space of the transitory: from family to friends, from the nation to personal objects, including culture, language, ideology. Everything here is ephemeral, that is, always waiting for that moment in which the native country irreversibly dissipates on the horizon.
If they ever returned it would be to find that other non-everyday, artificial place that was forbidden to them, the showcase country that they have seen displayed not only in tourism magazines but also in official speeches, and that perhaps they dreamed of living, enjoying , if provisionality did not make them erase from their minds even those monstrosities of pyrotechnics, manufactured more than to sustain an economy, to sell to the world what Cuba is not really for Cubans without resources or power to obtain them, that is , for the majority.
Some time ago I met a friend from my student days, one of those who always reminds me with laughter of those days of the “Special Period” when, together with Vladimir Regueiro, current Minister of Finance—my other good friend at that time—, We waited for hours for a bus to return home after leaving university. It was the moment when, not being able to do other things than wait and wait at the stop, we talked at length about how bad the transportation was, of course, but also about what we would do in the future, about everything good or bad that we imagined.
Today it seems we are already in that future, and as that friend I met by chance told me, reminding me of our study times, this is the moment we were talking about and in which almost all of the friends from that time are still present, although most of them very far from here, you could say that it is like the nightmare that we never imagined, reinforced by the image of one of us—one of those like me who were waiting to push the bus up, as if in an assault—being part of that regime that has reinforced in us the feeling of provisionality.
OPINION ARTICLE
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2024-04-01 19:20:59
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