No, this is not the sign-off call from a Cuban police officer from their checkpoint, but the guarded voice of a generation that is seeing the culmination of an entire era of sterile sacrifice crowned always with the yearning for what’s basic.
Havana and Juarez have something in common. In each city, several of their citizens have found a peculiar way to broadcast the complexities of the news.
In a tribe where there’s a shortage of water, anyone who possesses a bucket of that precious fluid will feel superior to the rest of the horde. Similarly, the owner of an air conditioning unit in Havana will have reasons to feel different from the rest of us. This is because here, anyone who possesses such an appliance will escape the severity of summer – at least at night.
Last night on the Latin American TeleSur network, I saw two undocumented immigrants in the US (one Mexican and the other Guatemalan) both protesting the privileges and protection the American government extends to Cuban emigrants in the US through the Cuban Adjustment Act.
Several days ago, while walking through Havana with a London photographer, he told me he didn’t like the restored part of the city because it appeared too much like just another European city. For this friend, what was different was capturing the municipality of Centro Havana in his lens, an area where the restoration work of the Office of the City Historian has yet to arrive.
The usual habitual suspects are easy to identify: They’re standing around the doors of cultural events and debates that they’re prohibited from entering.
Once again the “visionary politicians of the region” filled their rhetoric with the ever real possibility of a luminous future for the entire region (and laid the blame for all the continent’s problems on the USA).
In Latin America respect for institutions and the elimination of caudillo-ism are unresolved issues in our politics. Only by tackling these will be able to move from endemic corruption to the true rule of law, where respect for one’s fellow human being is the maxim of the countries of the region.
The position taken by my friends regarding my decision to write for Havana Times has gone through several phases. The first one was the unavoidable stage of warning me that anything could happen to someone in Cuba who collaborates with the non-official press. “Be careful, please, be careful!” they cautioned.
Today Cubans are also discovering the benefits of “green medicine,” natural remedies that for a long time were associated with a low-level of cultural development and “obscurantism”; their use had been limited to people assumed to be “ignorant.”