Here in Cuba Waiting Has Got Us Desperate

By Aurelio Pedroso (Progreso Semanal)

HAVANA TIMES – As harmful as the virus, the worst thing that can happen to us is to call on fake painkillers and think that we are tenaciously resisting in the face of hardship. In reality, with all of our problems, things aren’t looking too good.

In other words, we can bury our heads like ostriches, or we can wait for something to happen like in that classic children’s book. A child warns from the heart of a butt-kissing and opportunistic crowd that applauds with fake fervor, that the king is naked. He isn’t wearing the allegedly wonderful invisible garment made for him by a couple of scam artists.

At this point of our story, which has been going on for a long time, these tedious and unfortunate past thirteen months, we need to find a loophole where new motivation comes to push us forward. The effectiveness of our potential vaccines could be the beginning of another new long path forward, although they won’t be enough in the social and economic scheme of things. Or the political one either, let’s be honest.

Unable to tell a Sunday apart from a Wednesday, except for the always unsatisfactory TV programming to tell us, with us switching the channel every 5 seconds because it’s always the same movies on. Time is no longer our ally and has rather become a lewd enemy lying in wait for us 24/7.

Our public health authorities recognize this. Exhaustion is taking its toll just like the mutating effects of this virus. If policies don’t publicly admit it, it isn’t because they are unaware of the situation. Rather, it is because they don’t want to encourage greater problems that can’t be solved in the present.

We are living in times when we shouldn’t forget what History has taught us. Not only our national history, which is quite rich by the way, but History beyond our borders too. I regularly read through Lenin’s excellent treatise about the failure of the Paris Commune. He clearly demonstrates the mistakes of those budding socialists who, with the enemy at Versailles’ door, wasted time discussing whether bakers should work during the night, early morning or in the bright light of day.

Every mistake made when it comes to the general population right now, is a dangerous boomerang that hasn’t been manufactured in the Empire’s labs exactly.

The vast majority of Cubans are betting on socialism. A new kind of socialism, a reformed version, where the general population is constantly being consulted. One without the fear of modernizing outdated structures that Life itself has thrown in the trash. Where we don’t get into a heated debate about the age-old problem of bread or whether bakers should make it after a siesta.

It’s a question of everyone’s survival, of a system that needs to be renovated in order to move forward.

Read more from Aurelio Pedroso here on Havana Times.