Very sad and ardent privilege.
Fina García Marruz
My central creed is this: there are no bad men, because there is no such thing as a negative essence. Therefore, no condemnation is just in the face of the human spirit, despite the demonstrable opportunity for punishment. In practice, this creed is often confused with cowardice or lack of commitment — a confusion that has sometimes driven those who have professed it most sincerely to martyrdom. Believing, like Bulgakov’s Jesus, that there are no bad men is what makes me a Christian. But I also believe, like Bulgakov’s Christ, that cowardice is the worst flaw, since it makes impunity possible.
The greater the impunity, the greater the dehumanization and abuse. What we call empire is nothing more than superlative central impunity, with a dehumanized foreign policy and “democratic colors”; that’s why it’s evil, even if it attracts material progress within its borders.
It seems like a joke that an empire calls our government authoritarian. But the joke sours when we realize that our government is not immune to the temptation of impunity, which is the empire’s most condemnable trait.
Was the Havana of the cabarets and casinos built by the untouchables of another era perhaps less tolerable than the Havana of the inaccessible (and so far empty) hotels built by the untouchables of today?
In both cases, the keyword is impunity. When impunity is enthroned, we can no longer speak of anti-imperialism or of taking sides with the poor.
I deplore many things about Havana, where I live, and I would have deplored many things about the Havana of a hundred or two hundred years ago. The suffocation of the present is greater when ignorance prevents us from putting things into perspective.
There is a chasm between the deliberate harmony that reigns, for example, behind the walls of the cultural center where I work, and the involuntary squalor of its surroundings. This rift, however, is not new. Bridging the gaps, we can evoke the classrooms of the San Carlos Seminary and the Colegio El Salvador, where, according to Martí, “the air was like Greek,” where Varela, Saco, and Luz taught, and where Havana residents, in an enthusiastic minority, flocked to hear discussions on universal and national issues. And then contrast those bubbles of the spirit, seemingly fragile but never entirely ceasing to emerge, with the crude materialism of the neighboring slave market, forever extinct, or with the deeds and words of the Captain General, whose name we no longer remember, but which used to be the most important news of the moment.
I’m ashamed to say it, but I don’t know the history of my own country in detail. I began to know it late and, therefore, I began to love it late. I blame this, in part, to our schools, where, under the pretext of combating ignorance, ignorance, which is the rejection of knowledge, is strengthened. But I learned enough to want to be among those who found in the sand and wrote in the wind. The value of a fragment, as well as that of a minority, cannot be underestimated.
A significant number of errors and injustices have been rectified in Cuba. Meanwhile, countless absurdities of varying magnitude persist with the usual apparent impunity. And the normalization of impunity prevents us from distinguishing, in our circumstances, what is essential from what is accidental.
One day, with horror, I discovered that my children didn’t know what a buñuelo (sweet fritter) was. Heritage fruits like the star apple, the soursop, the sugar apple, and the cashew almost never reach the markets either. With feudal arbitrariness, the slaughter of cows is considered little less than a capital crime, similar to hunting the King’s deer, and similarly punished.
In Baracoa, the tourism-focused market has displaced the popular tetí fishing, and my sadness grows even greater when I think that many Cubans have never even heard of the tetí, a delicious emblem of our first township, now plagued by blackouts lasting up to 22 hours.
There are many days when Obispo, the street where I live, resembles a Court of Miracles, saturated with the destitute, hustlers, beggars, the disabled, and prostitutes. It’s heartrending, but not surprising. For more than 30 years, we’ve been receiving one-twentieth or thirtieth of what would have been an acceptable minimum wage. Do we really need to explain the terrible consequences of such a situation becoming normal?
And this social defeat, which discourages almost any attempt at honest endeavor in our homeland, comes at the end of genuinely heroic deeds in pursuit of dignity, sovereignty, and justice!
It’s not just the detailed economic damage, but the discrediting of the liberating struggle. In school, they told me about the unity of our revolutionary struggles. I wonder if that’s still taught, or if by chance someone still insists that we’re governed by the successors of Céspedes and Agramonte.
I try to explain to my children that there is such a thing as Cuba, that is not the filth, the destruction, the everyday mendicancy and rudeness, that it’s definitely not the government, and it’s not the trash that passes for music today on this island blessed with musical genius.
Our conversations on the subject are frustrating but honest; perhaps that’s why they leave me with a good taste in my mouth, despite the alarming realization that, if our entire family emigrated, my children wouldn’t miss anything about Cuba.
Being largely a dream, a project, and the yearning sum of the merits of its children, Cuba is an initiatory secret that can hardly be told to those who are not already, or not yet, part of it. I fear my words have not achieved much so far. Only my actions, ostensibly aimed at staying here, and also those of other members of our family, have helped my children accept that there is such a thing as Cuba.
They still have to discover that this “thing” is sacred, that it deserves all our efforts and the pain of living here or there.
The task is not easy. Throughout its brief and turbulent history, Cuba has not been free enough to bring to fruition the ideals of its best children. Those ideals have been snatched away from us by internal and external elements, both with reactionary measures and progressive arguments. The wheat is too deeply hidden in the chaff.
It is not surprising, when you look at the matter closely, that my children have barely begun to discover the island they have never left. They know it more by hearsay, or secondhand, like an invisible star they can only detect indirectly through the effects of its gravitational pull.
As a result of these family conversations, a new motivation has emerged within me for the work we do at the Casa Vitier García Marruz. What can a cultural center do in the face of the aspiration to emigrate that has been increasing drastically within our families? We will not be able to heal this terrifying wound, but we will try to make the eternal treasures of our nation more visible, more accessible, closer, and more lovable.
The goal is for Cuban families, starting with ours — and even those who achieve the dream of emigrating as a whole — to retain the very sad and ardent privilege of yearning for Cuba.
