My Frustrated Attempt to Live in Boyaca, Colombia
HAVANA TIMES – I have a friend who’s a member of the Jehovah’s Witness congregation, although he follows their discipline more than he attends their worship services. He’s told me that he often feels discriminated against at their meetings.
I don’t like to confront him, but I eventually asked: Why do you continue insisting on being part of that group when it’s so hard for you to follow their rules and be accepted? Why don’t you join another where you might feel better? Doesn’t your attitude display a certain degree of unconscious learned helplessness or low self-esteem?
He responded that in no way can he see himself belonging to another community. Despite the experiences he may undergo by belonging to this one, he can’t imagine himself in another congregation or faith group.
I was left wondering brashly if his attitude is correct or not. Is it really worth the sacrifice to continue belonging to a group where you’re received with disdain, rejection, misunderstanding – simply because at some point you thought it was an unquestionable duty and obligation?
I’m not a fan of his position. I think every human being deserves a context where they’re allowed to fulfill themselves and fully live their existence. Not where they’re put down, underestimated, utilized or under-utilized, because another group in power has so determined.
These were the reasons that led me in 2020 to decide to leave Cuba completely. I wanted to live in Colombia and put down definitive roots in a place where my friend had told me there was a climate of nobility, without the need to generate so much money to live. The place was eight hours away from the chilly Bogota, she told me, and also small and very welcoming. At that time, not only did I load my backpack with all the essentials, but also took my mat, because everywhere you go you need to pray, meditate or observe yourself, even if it be just a tad, or pelín, as the Spanish say.
It was then, at the airport, ticket in hand, that I suffered the fearful experience of having the Cuban government (through the ruling Cuban Communist Party’s State Security) inform me I wasn’t allowed to leave. I was regulada, meaning you don’t have permission to leave the country. That was February 15, 2016 – I don’t forget the date, because the previous day had been February 14, a widely celebrated holiday here.
“Why?” I asked them. They told me I should go to the emigration offices in Havana’s Revolution Plaza and they’d answer me there.
I was very tired, and had little money to make more little trips than the ones I’d budgeted for. I also had no desire to have them tell me what I sensed they would: “we’re not letting you leave the country because you’re posting articles “against the government, in independent websites.” In fact, that’s the response I eventually got from the compañeros I asked in the State Security Offices here in Holguin, where I live.
In this case – unlike my Jehovah’s Witness friend, who won’t leave his congregation because he feels it’s his duty to belong there no matter what the consequences – I decided not to continue engaging with the social and political project of my homeland, because I feel, believe and think that it doesn’t allow me to live with the necessary freedom, rights, dignity and justice a woman or man of our time, in our Western culture, demands. In other words, I feel my human growth is stunted.
And this same Power also doesn’t allow me to fulfill myself anywhere else.
What to do then, when you’re not fulfilled where you are, but they don’t allow you to fulfill yourself where you decide to try? Because they themselves don’t let you, with the regulations they’re constantly creating.
Another friend responded: redirect yourself. Of course – reorient. The challenge is in trying to carry out that latter action under such regrettable conditions, where you can’t count on electricity, water, gas, or adequate food, in addition to the abstracts I’ve already mentioned, and the bottle of wine that’s always lacking.
Reorienting is like some additional travail, a punishment, a constant shipwreck, after which you have to rethink everything, see how to salvage something. That’s how I see it.
This experience isn’t exclusive to me; it’s the experience of many Cubans. Not to mention an entirely different problem – that they let you leave, but never again return, as happened to journalist and writer Amir Valle, today living in Germany, and many others. And I don’t doubt that there are even more painful accounts to be discovered on this Island spelled with four-letters: Cuba.