Writing “Objectively” about Cuba

By Pedro Pablo Morejon

HAVANA TIMES – I’ve been going through my articles for Havana Times recently. Trying to be as empathetic as possible, I discovered that many of my chronicles or opinions can be interpreted, a lot of the time, as me trying to always paint a negative picture of Cuba. Or in the best of cases, that I have a bitter view of our reality.

That’s while always trying to give a touch of humor to my articles.

However, this could not be further from the truth. Even though I’ve never studied a Journalism degree, I go to great lengths to be objective. However, nothing is completely objective when you’re speaking from the heart. Even so, I always try to be true when reflecting the situation on this small piece of land I’ve been destined to live on.

I can’t sugarcoat reality though, unfortunately. For example, I can’t hide the freedoms we’re missing, or the everyday hurdles we Cubans have to jump just to ensure the basic needs of every human being.

Here, something as basic as putting food in your stomach becomes a struggle that can’t even be compared to prehistoric times when cavemen had to hunt down mammoths.

Any aspect of Cuban reality that you want to examine will inevitably give you hives. Almost everything is bad!

Transport, housing, food, services, labor rights, individual freedoms, democracy, decency… and a long list of others.

I say almost everything so as not to be absolutist about it.

Free education and health care

Not even alleged achievements in the fields of health and education can be presented as proof of a superior society.

Medicine shortages right now are alarming, not to mention prices have gone up. The COVID-19 situation here in Cuba has also meant that health services have now been limited to emergency cases. Nothing can even be said about the proliferation of scabies, rodents, dengue fever, etc.

The only thing we can say about our education system is that nobody is illiterate in our country. That’s it. We are living under the yoke of a politicized education, the main function of which seems to be to indoctrinate Cubans from an early age. 

I would prefer not to write about that. Instead, I’d like to write that Cuba is an example of a dignified country, where its residents live freely and have an acceptable quality of life. A country that resembles what many of us Cuban want. Like the dream of that person I wrote about in an article here about a year ago.

But I can’t present a pretend reality like the one fabricated by official media.

That would be going against the truth. I have literature if I want to write fiction.

Read more from Pedro Pablo Morejon’s diary here.