While Life Slips Away
HAVANA TIMES – Today I remembered a friend who emigrated for political reasons. He’s been living in Spain for years.
We have a mutual friend, but their bond was much deeper. So I was deeply puzzled to learn that, once outside of Cuba, he said he believed she was collaborating with State Security and blocked her on social media.
In a dysfunctional environment that cultivates paranoia, anyone can seem like an accomplice of the enemy.
Everything feels so strange, I think, when I see an update from my friend on Facebook and take a screenshot to share it with her. In this tormented world, it must be said, genuine friendship is a privilege.
She’s always glad to hear news about him. And I feel caught in the middle of an additional, artificial, and absurd distance.
We live in societies marked by division and distrust.
Lately, perhaps due to the burden of hardship, political debates give me the sensation of spinning on a carousel.
The exhaustion from blackouts, outrageous prices, and that surreal inertia that keeps survival going in Cuba (always on the edge of the abyss) seems on the verge of collapse.
Deep down, excluding very selfish or wicked people, we all want the same things. Peace, the freedom to prosper, to express ourselves and to associate. To create and develop projects—economic, artistic, scientific, environmental… To walk the streets (clean ones) of a developing country. To contribute to and belong to that stretch of land where you live, whether you were born there or not.
I understand that opinions are inevitable, and that one can get swept away by the political fervor of the moment. But life imposes such harsh challenges… At least in Cuba, almost all of us share the same sadness and the same weariness.
We’re constantly losing people who leave, swallowed by distance and their own personal paths, shifting interests.
I’ve lost count of how many Facebook followers and acquaintances have distanced themselves from me just for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.
October 7, 2023, split the world in two, and the larger piece (as usual) stood with power. With those who drop bombs even on hospitals. With those who are exterminating an entire people.
There was a time when I believed that anyone who spoke up for individual and collective freedom was a defender of truth. Big mistake. Most people react against a form of injustice only when it directly affects them. The rest get buried in comfortable relativism.
With the Trump administration, the line dividing humanity seems to have grown even more solid. But it’s not about left or right. It’s about what is right versus what is wrong. As it has been for millennia.
We Cubans often sin in our naivety. Many still believe communism is the only evil on this earth. Anything that doesn’t carry that label must be good. It doesn’t matter if it’s a discourse full of empty promises, hysteria, or incompetence, like the ones that condemned this Island. It doesn’t matter if it stirs up division, an exaggerated nationalism with no clear direction or practical application. It doesn’t matter if it carries the energy of hatred and destroys the dreams that, in the most secret corners of our hearts, we still share.
I admire animals because they take offense so lightly. I see it all the time in my cats. They don’t hold grudges. One moment they’re angrily attacking each other, and the next they’re hugging, grooming one another.
Of course, they lack the perverse sophistication of the human intellect, which poses a real danger. But at least among friends, we could step outside of these power struggles that inevitably shape our destinies, and help each other however we can, while we still inhabit these bodies doomed to leave, who knows when.