I Don’t Want to Be an Aspirin
Alfredo Fernandez
About a week ago, a conversation arose between co-workers regarding the phenomenon of how, at the street level, people have thousands (millions?) of common ideas about how to improve the country’s situation.
In this discussion, a lot of interesting things were said (things I won’t repeat here for obvious reasons).
I left for home and began to think about everything I’d heard and how I could to contribute to these much wanted improvements. My conclusion was horrible.
Gradually I became conscious of something that I had already forgotten: If you don’t do what they order you from above, you will be viewed as an undisciplined or controversial figure, a dissident or a counter-revolutionary.
But to do what they order from above is to continue with the same old thing; and what doesn’t improve, worsens; as they say around here.
I concluded that up there they’re sick, and that there illness requires a strong medication, a very strong one. Moreover, since those of us down here are not that medicine, that healing medicine, I’ve decided not to do anything, absolutely nothing; neither for nor against.
The problem is that what they allow us to do is so little that they’ve made us into aspirins; while tumors must be operated on and cut out at the root.
Let’s leave it to God or Cuban medicine to find the cure of the evil.
Though I, sincerely, don’t want to be an aspirin.
I think what Alfredo Fernandez is expressing is his TEMPORARY loss of will; he’s frustrated and sees no movement forward. Sometimes we have to pull back and reflect upon WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. What is needed, of course, is REAL input, REAL dialogue, between the the government and those governed. Endless repitition of old slogans and lip-service to the Revolution’s ideals will not do. The people KNOW what needs to be done; their talents are vast and they have already articulated many solutions. It is time for the government to start trusting the people; it is time for the government to start implementing solutions the people are proposing. Why are governments instituted in the first place? For the same reasons revolutions occur. If this divergence between reality and ideals continues, I see the Revolution headed over the same pecipice as other failed revolutions before–but this does not need to be the case.
I hope you’re not thinking the answer lies with the U.S. ‘pharmaceutical industry’…
The thing is: you either get rid of the stalinism holding Cuba back, or the Revolution fails — & Cuba becomes the next (very capitalist/feudal) Guatemala. That includes the *deathsquads*, is what I’m getting at. You’re thinking Cuba will instead become one, big beachfront Miami, maybe? Where everyone wears expensive pastel-colored suits & expensive Rolexes..? Well, you would be very, VERY wrong in hoping for that, fella. Oh-so wrong. You do not want capitalism. Ever. I’ve lived it my entire life — including my entire life as a(n oppressed) communist under it. I know this (wage-)slave system backwards & forwards: & the mass-media “glitz & glamor” hides a quite ugly reality — which includes mass graves & famine & gulags at the bottom of it. Just not in Times Square. Or Piccadilly.
Only fools would sell out their country & their class, for ‘future options’ on a mess of pottage.