Grab the Machete!
By Eduardo N. Cordovi Hernandez
HAVANA TIMES – The truth is that I’ve always heard it said that people—human beings, that is—tend more and more to be “a streetlamp outside and darkness at home.” A metaphor that hints at a kind of behavior focused more on what happens outside one’s real interests, paying more attention to other people’s affairs than to one’s own.
It doesn’t seem very virtuous, to say the least, and unpleasant as it may sound, we have to admit that, without demonizing the poor human species, it does seem to be quite true. So much so that even those of us who criticize it eventually realize that we do the same thing.
I’m talking about myself. In recent months, in what we might call our shared living area—the geographic neighborhood, we’ve had a whole series of events unfolding in such a way that, from the outset, they put us on edge and kept us in suspense, with all the fervor surrounding the movement of US naval war machinery heading toward Venezuela.
Wow! The world is going to end! Now this is it! Maduro is finally going to be put through the wringer and will end up trembling, saying “daddy” and “mommy” so incoherently no one can understand him. But the days passed, turned into weeks, then piled up into months, and by then the old folks in my neighborhood didn’t even want to talk about the issue anymore.
Mind you, it’s not that one wants there to be a war in Venezuela, nor that the Yankees can’t be granted a bit of extra time, just in case the millions offered for the capture of maledetto Maduro might ripen the temptation of some daring general or some repressed colonel with an entrepreneurial streak.
But then there was also that whole situation with the gentleman who owns a private army of professional soldiers, which made many people say, “Damn! Now this is it!”—perhaps thinking, as others announced, that once Venezuela was dealt with, they’d take advantage of the moment to finally clean up the mess of building collapses in Old Havana, the blackouts, the lack of gas, water, and even shame, according to some.
But people—meaning the folks in my neighborhood—were already talking as if they were US taxpayers. They commented on what was wrong with people in Miami, who don’t realize that Trump is squandering money fattening up marines on a Caribbean excursion. And as I already said: it’s not that one wants war anywhere, but—hell! as they’d say in Spain.
The thing is, out of the blue they put together a full-blown “Hampanga tripilingo”—that is, a meteoric mobilization with all the hardware they’ve had parked there… no one even knows how long anymore, but someone told me it was surely costing more per day than what a pound of pork would cost in Havana on December 31. Do the math yourself. I spent several days going out just trying to buy a bitter orange. In the end, after combing the whole neighborhood, I found someone who had them and was selling them for eighty pesos each.
Seriously: what does it matter to people in Cuba how much it cost the United States taxpayer to keep the Southern Command stationed off Venezuela? We’re up to our necks in problems, yet all we do is comment on what’s happening next door, how the neighbors are sorting out their messes, while we do nothing to get out of our own.
A lot of hunger? Yes. And everything is scarce, and outrageously expensive. But there are still fields being swallowed by marabú weed, and I don’t see anyone sharpening a machete, honing a sickle, fitting a hoe handle… I don’t know—maybe we’re waiting for the messiah or for manna to fall from the sky.
In the end, today I woke up to the news that our neighbor Maduro has been captured after a lightning operation in order to be tried in the United States. In truth, doing a stretch behind bars seems to be part of the fate that accompanies great leaders throughout history: there’s the immense Napoleon Bonaparte on Saint Helena, the no less grand Mandela. Even Fidel Castro was imprisoned on what was then the Isle of Pines! And Hugo Chávez as well, in Venezuela. So why not Maduro too…?