Cuba Is Going to Change
HAVANA TIMES — Many years ago I had a dream in which I saw Cuba with an impressive prosperity. “It’s the future!” I thought.
I know precognition exists, and I have lived through situations I had already received signs about, also long in advance. The memory of those visions sustained me when depression suffocated me and the illusion that state centered country was my only alternative.
I remember the first time I left the Island, heading to Paris, after having unsuccessfully tried to travel several times before. But on that occasion, everything was so simple! Like a ship sailing pushed by the wind. Gently, sweetly. Everything in its favor.
It is difficult for me to convey that it is the same sensation I feel now regarding Cuba’s social reality.
As if rigid internal moorings had come loose. As if an obstinacy were melting away, perhaps not in reasoning but in the fact that a cycle, a time, is coming to an end.
Because even curses break when the moment arrives.
However, I also know that the materialization of dreams is never as one would wish.
Even on that first trip, I confirmed that no country is, nor will be, like those astral cities I have seen, where matter does not wrap you in the density of its weight, with the objective history of earthly kingdoms, sunk to the root in exploitation and in human and animal suffering. The overabundance, the saturation of visual impressions, the competition, the frivolity… A ferocious progress where the law of love does not rule.
It has happened to people who have come out of prison: beyond the euphoria of reunions and the incomparable experience of freedom, they discover that their longing excluded aspects of reality. Family estrangements, clashes with a world idealized during confinement.
But even so, of course one prefers and chooses freedom.
I believe Cuban civil society has been articulating itself from within impossibility itself. And this is why, to all those who say it will take decades for us to recover, I can assure you it won’t. Because just as illness contributes to decadence and death, cure contributes to regeneration and life.
When you look at everything Cubans do on a personal level to survive and sustain their families, with everything against them, just imagine what it would be like with everything in their favor. Magic isn’t needed to rebuild when there is economic freedom, supplies, options… Magic is needed to do it with nothing. As we have done until now.
Regarding the so-called “anthropological damage” (generalized moral deterioration), this only exists under very specific conditions: lack of prospects for prosperity, corruption, mediocrity accepted in exchange for political loyalty… If business interests rule, everything starts aligning with its logic of investment and profit.
Nobody who is not efficient will keep a job, no matter how many slogans they are willing to shout. When order is restored, everything else begins to link together naturally.
Totalitarianism is a structure that obstructs that does not allow the flow of money. And it’s not that capitalism is a just system — we know it isn’t — but it is the most organic, given human imperfection, at least for material prosperity. Within that, the rest is achieved through adjustments in the form of agreements and laws that guarantee the practice of justice to the greatest extent possible.
This, for now, is the most abstract part of that change that can be felt in the air and in the deepest layers of the collective subconscious, like a pain that can no longer be endured.
Because Cuba is about to break apart from within, from so much imposed and prolonged resistance. No change will be perfect, of course, but breaking out of the state of paralysis is an unpostponable urgency.
We have learned so much from inaction… What could we not do when our creativity and effort can finally spread their wings.