Will There Be More Solidarity in a Post Covid-19 World?

By Alfredo Fernandez

HAVANA TIMES – The concept “solidarity” has made a great comeback, in recent times. Helping others, read here: friends, people in a vulnerable situation, abandoned animals; have luckily become an everyday concern.

The world has stopped, over 150 countries have been in lockdown for forty days already. Capitalism and its frenetic production of material goods, which seemed unstoppable, has come to a grinding halt. A real miracle.

One question that still lingers, not on intellectuals and culture experts, but on every human being’s mind: what will change after all of this?

I’m guessing that many things will change after the worst of this pandemic passes.

Where are the evangelical pastors who used to cure terrible diseases by placing their hands on your forehead? Where have they gone? Does it make sense for people who have started working from home as a result of this situation, to have to travel again to work every day?

Does the aesthetic of millennials and centennials and their love for empty and insignificant things make sense? Is life worth living to consume, to have an expensive car, luxury clothes etc.? Does it make sense to keep politicians in national assemblies, who earn a disproportionately high wage, on the taxpayer’s payroll?

These, and many other questions, have been hanging in the air for days now, in every mind with a couple of functioning brain cells. Many things will change from now on, nobody knows exactly what and those who do take a stabbing guess, are just talking to the wind.

To give you an example: I remember that there wasn’t a single political analyst who gave the Cuban political process more than two years after the Berlin Wall was knocked down in November 1989, and we’ve already seen what happened. Life exceeds our expectations quite often, and what we expect doesn’t happen a lot of the time, but the unexpected does, taking us by surprise, even if it shouldn’t.

After the Spanish Flu epidemic, humankind experienced the greatest economic boom until then, in 1920, which was interrupted by the Great Depression in 1929.

I don’t know what will happen, but this pandemic will bring lots of good things, which will open a sea of opportunity in its wake, just like other past crises. This has always been true!