The Cuban Transformation is Undeniable
HAVANA TIMES – In my experience as a bookseller, I know which books will sell quickly, which ones will sell over time, and which ones will never sell. The classics, stories, technical books, medicine, history, and dictionaries will have their buyers sooner or later. But there are texts that, as of today in Cuba, no one buys anymore.
Every time a customer comes to me with Marxist philosophy texts, like those from the Progreso publishing house, for example, intending to leave them for me to sell, I regret to inform them that their book won’t find a buyer anytime soon. Not to mention that it won’t sell at all, and it will give me more work organizing and dusting it off day after day.
Sometimes I think about that generation that was nourished by this information. Many of them will have passed away. Others, in the worst case, will have committed suicide. Another group will have decided to leave the country, and many others will walk the streets with the discontent carried by the rest of the Cuban population. With the question hanging over them: How far will our resistance last in the middle of a crisis that seems endless?
However, against all logic that could exist in a country known as socialist, that once had as its slogan in its widely followed political events: “Socialism or death,” the books that sell the most, with startling speed, are about religious spirituality. It doesn’t matter which one. These books are in high demand. They are also the hardest to find, but once they arrive in my hands, they already have an owner. I have lists of people with their phone numbers to call them immediately when I have them.
There is a strong Christian clientele, looking for biblical commentaries, Bibles, liturgy texts, or devotional books. There is also another strong clientele searching for texts about Yoruba faith, Palomonte, Abakua, scientific spiritism, or the one practiced in the east of the country, which is Cordón.
But it’s not just this experience: it’s the almost total disbelief in the ideology that was taught and relentlessly imposed for decades, and the search for other answers to survive the prevailing catastrophe. Answers that were politically denied in previous years. As if only magic and unshakable faith in that Mystery were the only things not to be discarded in the face of the economic and social tragedy that dominates.
But the change that can be felt in Cuba is not only in this issue of what we read or stop reading. In what we accept as a people or stop accepting. It’s in almost every aspect of society. This is not at all hard to verify. Even if a government wants to present a different facade against all odds.