Generation Empty

Kabir Vega

HAVANA TIMES – A few days ago, I found out from some posts on Facebook that a very unique Cuban poet had passed away. Raul Sunet, who only lived to 36 years of age, as he gave up his life committing suicide for many reasons, leaving behind a lot of unknowns about why he wanted to stop breathing and feeling.

However, it’s known that he emigrated to the United States, disgusted by Cuba’s political system above all else, fed up of his own generation.

Explicit proof of this is a poem he read during a concert before he left Cuba; he got up on stage and grabbed the microphone to read a text that he had just written, entitled:

“Yellow Mastodon Generation”

We are a colorless generation without victories or glory,

our feet won’t leave any mark behind so that our footsteps can be counted.

We are a generation of cowards who didn’t inherit any gene,

we don’t have anything from caciques, or the Mambises or rebels.

A downcast generation, short on philosophy or bravery,

unless that is surviving or seeking out our daily bread.

We are the Yellow Mastodon Generation, which is just like the animal,

we don’t exist in this time, and we are absurd rather than utopian.

We are a generation without light who fear its Bastille Day.

We are a generation of nobodies, of sheep, an empty generation.

We are the generation of the Yellow Mastodon…

Like Juan Carlos Flores, he was another poet who used his poetry to exorcise his demons, to spit out his disgust and the nausea his own generation created in him.

Who knows how he would have reacted when he found out about the #noaldecreto349 campaign here in Cuba? He might have supported it, or maybe for the first time he might have felt that not all Cubans have resigned themselves to our country’s physical, moral and spiritual demise.

Maybe the disgust he had for his generation wouldn’t have changed, but he would have at least known that he wasn’t the only one who felt that he needed to be an active agent of change, that he wasn’t alone.