Cuba: The Tyrannosaurus Rex Generation

By Martin Guevara

HAVANA TIMES — The experience of Syrian refugees – a drama much talked about around Europe today, which is cause enough for concern in and of itself – led me to make a rather disheartening observation.

The tragedies these exiles bring with them from their native soil are made worse when they fall into the hands of Serbian, Bulgarian and Hungarian criminals, who not hesitate to try and make a profit through human trafficking.

The worst, however, is to be found at the hands of mafias, governments and common people in former Soviet satellites, where “solidarity” or any respect for human rights is practically non-existent. All the while, Austria is showing an exemplary sensitivity and behavior.

The first half of the 20th century clearly showed us that Austrians are not intrinsically kind and that Hungarians, Serbs or Bulgarians are not demons by nature.

This is the result of the perverse experiment that was inaptly called “communist,” for it did not even adhere to the tenets that the ideology proclaimed at the time, the experiment essayed in the countries behind the Berlin Wall, where the least capitalist development was to be found.

Today, the largest numbers of young, working-class neo-Nazis are to be found precisely in Eastern European countries. Within Germany (which has earned for itself eternal suspicion), the majority of people who feel nostalgia for the holocaust are clearly concentrated in the area that was once the GDR.

I would like to be able to say that Cuba will go a different way, but I fear that the new generations, already composed of an army of young people who are apolitical to the bone, defenders of a kind of anti-culture, characterized by the worst imaginable taste and the most commercial aesthetic possible, will also have an instinct aversion to any notion of solidarity, that they will carry this aversion in their genes, molded and forged as these are by the intense and premeditated fiasco that accompanied that jargon, that terminology they were forced to adopt – that the present and future generations will not be able to avoid associating these ideas with the unique scam the Cuban people were subjected to for more than half a century.

This new phenomenon is expressed through a handful of vulgar words and auxiliary interjections that are as difficult to understand as they are insolent and aggressive.

Regrettably, we have to admit that it is far easier to share cultural, ethical and even political ideas with those Cubans who were deported during the first years of the Cuban “de-evolution” than it is with the voracious litter spawned by that utopian project aimed at creating the “New Man,” a project that led to the creation of young people reminiscent of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.