Surviving Communist Cuba as I Near Turning Fifty
HAVANA TIMES – I’ve been feeling very worn down these days. I tend to feel sadder than emotionally steady. So, I try by every means to lift my spirits and find, within the circumstances, reasons to be grateful despite everything. The recurring idea comes back to my mind: “I live in a concentration camp; I have to learn how to survive it.” That’s when I turn to those movie banks so widespread throughout Cuba, where they sell documentaries, films, shows, musicals, etc., and I ask for ten gigabytes of movies on themes about the Second World War, for example.
Some are interesting, others not so much, but I consume them voraciously. It’s my favorite topic in documentaries and in all kinds of information that can reach me. Because I tell myself: If there were people who survived those Nazi concentration camps, it means that I can survive my Caribbean communist concentration camp.
Then a text came to me, a United States classic, but about the First World War in which USA took part. It’s called Company K, by William Kennedy. I loved it. It recounts those horrifying experiences with such humanity that I was left, at the very least, feeling grateful, and with a duty toward my species to cultivate peace at all costs.
But I always need more and more information, because I feel that all the information in the world is not enough for me to learn how to endure this country I’ve had to live in. I heard someone very close to me say that she only wishes for the Yanks to arrive (to invade and occupy this country) so they would end the blackouts and fill the stores with food (I infer she meant food at accessible prices, because food does exist, but who can afford it?).
So, amid so much powerlessness and frustration, one ends up dreaming of saviors who might come from anywhere, as long as they lift this curse of living in such terrible conditions. Do we really care who they are? Whether they’re Chinese, Russians, Yanks, or extraterrestrials… as long as something happens.
Meanwhile I tell myself: you have to create strategies to survive day by day. Somehow. And I’ve seriously told myself: Lien, don’t read any more novels, poetry, short stories, or biographies. Just as you watch war films, look for military material. I want to build a military culture for myself. How do you survive in swampy trenches without food? How do you function with hunger and fear and even terror? How can survival plans be created in extreme situations? Don’t I live in a kind of war condition? Here in Cuba, only the bombs are missing.
But I don’t know where to look for information. And I have the bad feeling that my internet de palo (as Cubans call the internet the Communist Party allows those of us unlucky enough to live under its control) is even more restricted now, because I feel that none of the information I search for appears. And to top it off, one of those national networks popped up that nearly scared me to death. I looked into it and found that you can end up on some familiar link there, where you’re sort of controlled by some group — I don’t even know who — and I’m truly insulted by the whole situation. I decided not to search for anything else on Google, and not to look at Facebook either.
I don’t have military friends to ask anything. So I told myself: start with literature. I’m thinking of reading this Russian writer, Yury Dold-Mikhailik, “A solas con el enemigo” (Alone with the Enemy). Surely, I’ll find information on how to deal with that oppressive system, and it will help me personally to survive this communism that many Cubans hope will not last much longer. Hopefully it will end this very year.