Incomplete Motherhood and Mother’s Day in Cuba

Veronica Vega

HAVANA TIMES – This second Sunday of May, Mother’s Day, a national pretext for congratulations, visits, gifts paid with what you don’t have and fulfillment of a ritual full of insincerity, I find myself trying to save a newborn kitten that was thrown into the trash.

Replacing nature is impossible. And while I see the detriment of a living being that is agonizing precisely because of maternal absence, I wonder what kind of sensibility has been tried and intended to be created among Cubans, extolling only the value of the human mother.

Motherhood shares the principle of protection and compassion. An instinct that has been activated in animals even for different species. There are verified stories of animals that have saved even children.

What kind of species is the human being whose superiority consists in ignoring the basic, mysterious laws that originate their own existence? In using their faculty of discernment and organization only to dominate, manipulate and abuse at will and with unbridled despotism.

The foundation of all power is service to others. Any other use made of biological, physical, economic or political power is destructive and counterproductive.

I remember when in school they talked to us about Mother’s Day, as if only women had the privilege of gestation and the experience of sacrifice in the care of a being that comes in total helplessness, dependent on special attention and whose abandonment implies its death.

I understand that because they are secular schools, they never spoke to me about the principle of the Cosmic Mother, which in Hinduism is considered the shakti or energy responsible for earthly life, which guides us to comply with natural laws to guarantee health, balance and harmony.

But they did not even talk to me about the Earth, our planet, as a supplying mother that sustains us. A mother who also welcomes our bodies when the last breath has been exhaled and its destiny is decomposition and putrefaction.

Nor did they tell me about animal motherhood, which is a much better example of unconditional love because it only aspires to the safety and independence of the offspring without waiting for reward, without hindering the exercise of their freedom. Much less did they tell me about the right of homosexuals to exercise motherhood, or to facilitate the adoption of orphaned children instead of guaranteeing their inaccessibility with a dysfunctional bureaucracy where children are the first to lose.

The new generations would benefit a lot in this country, in a clear economic, moral, spiritual crisis, if the official propaganda took on a different course. Instead of promoting offers in stores with payment in hard currency, huge photos where the concept of family is based on material comfort and capitalist consumption, it could carry out campaigns to rescue abandoned animals who instinctively struggle to survive despite the imposed and cruel maternal deprivation.
Laws could be passed to punish irresponsibility and human transgression over fellow people and over other species.

Campaigns could promote the value of exercising piety in any expression and without distinction of age, race, creed, ideology, social status, sex, gender or any other denomination that tries to separate life, from life.

With the way they speak to us continuously of the Homeland in a masculinized language where the outbursts of anger and the practice of intolerance prevail in innumerable ways, they never talk of Cuba as the Mother who suffers discord and resentment among her offspring, as the Mother who loves all her children equally, even if they are far from her.