To Our Parents

By Armando Chaguaceda

HAVANA TIMES – For the books you read to us, lying on the pillow. For accompanying our first steps and words. For everything lived, these lines go out to you.

We are adults and assume our own destinies. But you support what twisted ours. What took us away from you. What you – according to some sad words, whispered at the edge of the sea – helped to build and then expelled us from that country. If you decide to forgive them for so much distance and absence, it is your right. We cannot forgive them, nor do we want to.

Consequence is not blindness. Nobody asks you to deny, in a public square, what you once believed or lived. That which for a long time now has had another face, false and vile. Please don’t continue to perpetuate lies and violence. Don’t wave slogans and clubs to crush ideas and people. Including those of your children, those of your children’s friends, those of other parents’ children.

Don’t invoke the inevitable. There are many from your generation who today open their eyes. Although there are still not so many who open their mouths. Do at least that: have the courage to remain silent.

Don’t talk about sovereignty. The country is supported by its emigrants. Families eat thanks to relatives who left. Food that comes, remember, from the hated neighbor. And you know it.

Do not invoke equality. Rich kids (and those kids’ parents) don’t live like you. And you know it.

Don’t mention dignity. There is none if there is fear of writing certain things to us, if you lie inside the home, if every day you live on the edge of what they call illegality. And you know it.

The only real sovereignty, equality, and dignity are those that are lived in freedom. When a regime doesn’t force you to choose between it and your family. When your beliefs are not imposed by crushing those of others. When History is not a pretext to freeze the present and kill the future.

Love is not indulgence. It is understanding. We understand your circumstances. We disapprove of your choices. Because they sustain an apparatus of fear and misery. Fear and misery that you yourselves submit to.

We are not of the same thinking. You defend a tyranny while we push for freedom.

A tyranny that denies our existence. That mortgages our prosperity and freedom. That humiliates, imprisons, tortures, exiles. That robs us of the possibility of growing old together.

But one thing is clear: they will not be able to separate us. You will not lack the medicine to alleviate your ailments. The food to finish another day. The word, small and necessary, to mitigate our sadness.

In that tomorrow, even those who denied us the present will have their place. There will be justice, but not revenge. Then you will see how useless it was all. How absurd your stubbornness was, clinging to a rotten shell.

And until that morning comes, despite everything we have experienced and what we still must live with, we will continue to love you.

Read more from Armando Chaguaceda here on Havana Times.