Haroldo Dilla

I read with interest the article by Fernando Ravsberg, the BBC correspondent in Havana, about the announcement by the Cuban Government of another a “Nation and Emigration Conference.”

This past Wednesday night I received an email that had been sent out to numbers of people from a diligent Cuban-American cultural entrepreneur. It was a call from the Cuban Interests Section in Washington for the holding of a meeting with Cuban emigrants in the United States.

I cannot offer the Cuban political elite anything of what they seek in “updating” their battered model or helping it to function. To top it all off, though I think they have to be negotiated with, at the same time I think they are a major part of the problem.

Recently I had the privilege to be invited to participate in a workshop in Santo Domingo on the issue of national reconciliations. Obviously some ideas were exchanged concerning what should occur in Cuba at some point in time.

The Catholic Church is usually conservative, undemocratic, elitist and exclusionary. But ours (here in Cuba) — that’s to say, its leaders — have acted this way in such a blatantly arrogant fashion, and whenever presented with an opportunity to place themselves on the wrong side of history, they’ve always done it.

My fear is that we are beginning to experience another phase of the history of this city. The “socialist” city (mediocre and boring) is giving way to another city whose “brand” is precisely the metropolitan situation that was denied for five decades – with its glamor, mysteries and nights of sequins and sex.

Wilman Villar has left us another tragic example that freedom, as Manuel Azaña once said, doesn’t simply free people – it makes them human. There is very little information available about Villar’s case, and what does exist is very confusing (as always occurs in systems where information is a privilege and not a right).

If there is something that needs to be recognized about Cuba’s leaders, particularly Fidel Castro, it’s their unparalleled talent to retain power, whether by adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing.

This issue will be particularly difficult to solve for Cuba’s leaders. Moreover, the disparity between spokespeople themselves, crying out for changes that never come, could indicate internal contradictions within the elite. The fact is that if Cubans could travel without asking permission, be free to decide the dates of their coming and going, and travel without having to pay for expensive consular services the Cuban government currently demands, this would be taking an important step in dismantling the authoritarian political system.

This is the moment in which one wonders, if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. But above all, how much will have to paid by us — ourselves, our families, our friends — for this belated capitalist restoration, like Cuesta Morua said, for casinos and gangs.