There is something about Cuba

I have never really followed any cause, except for one that I was told to follow when I was a child without any conscience of what this cause really was.

I realized a little too late that it was all a lie and none of the other party followers where in it from the heart. I had the need to get out and when things eased a bit I took my chance and returned my Young Communist Party card.

Besides that, no body really started a movement when I was in Cuba, at least no body close to me enough to persuade me. I was just very busy trying to leave the country and that was my only cause, the only thing that unleashed my horses, the only thing to follow, my only fight.

On Monday March 5^th I kept seeing posts about a video on facebook. Driven by curiosity and being unable to guess what it was about (so I could move on) I felt the urge to click on it to see it.

It was called Kony 2012 and that told me next to nothing about it.

It was about Africa, I found out next, Continent of no interest to me at all if I may say this without offending anybody.

I knew about Africa only what they told me at School when I was little, how to find it in a Map, a little bit about Apartheid. I knew there were some places in that Continent where our Cuban troops were sent to fight, Angola, rang the bell.

I learned about how many Cuban families were angry for fighting a war that was not ours, when in the other hand it was something we should have been proud of, as some would say.

I knew, thanks to that old song that Sara Gonzales used to sing (I think) that it was a land tinted with blood and full of diamonds. I remember too, that song from Toto, and the video of a librarian that disappears when some Magic African totems seem to have awaken during her night shift. This I saw when I was 5 years old.

I knew what the movies through out the years told me, The Constant Gardener, The Last king of Scotland, Blood Diamond, to mention only a few. They gave a big picture, a very scary one and most of them made really clear there was no solution only blood and despair for those who get involved and try to help, when most of the wanting to be heroes trying to change the twisted African reality were destined to failure.

They would portrait a Continent with it’s own rules, based on cruelty mostly and death, a lot of death, diseases, lack of hope, water and food. But it was OK, in summary someone in the movie would make you think that you didn't have to feel guilty because it is Africa and it is always been like that and it will always be like that. So, I never really went to bed thinking that from our position there was something we could do. The movies allowed us to pretend that things were fine, exactly the way they were, and never feel bad about it. That was always the hidden message.

This videos only purpose was to expose the bloody figure of Joseph Kony (a Lord of War) and all his crimes in Uganda. It spread the message in a very successful way but it made me think of Cuba as well, and the almost 60 years that its been stopped in time. It made me question things, like, what will Cuba need to do to raise more awareness about its suffering? To raise more awareness about its people despair? Is it a video what we need? I thought. A genius one like Kony2012 that even raised my non-existing interest in causes like this?

Is it a good book, one written by the best writer of best sellers of the world? Is it blogs from its youth, written from within the country, describing all the conflicts first hand, the people struggle and their bitterness?

Do they need blood, death, and lack of food or water? Would any of those things help the world to see that there is time to do something?

I realized shortly after, that all these issues already exist in Cuba to different degrees; we have already dozens of amazing documentaries made by foreign and local artists. We have a very modern and graphic description of the Cuban reality, through its young and their blogs. We have amazing writers inside the country and some that are forced to be outside the country telling what our pain is all about. We already have the lack of food, water, and more important hope. We already have blood all over and these crimes are rising in the name of a stupid ideology that no body believes in any more.

I have already meet a lot of people that goes to Cuba with and idea and comeback in love with our country but very conscious that everything is wrong, the most naive ones connect our rejection with some preference to the US empire and it takes a lot of explanation to convinced them that there is no connection between both worlds. Not agreeing with the Cuban archaic system does not mean we respect the American model better, or even prefer it, it does not makes us all Yankees fans.

If somebody could see those two countries without a connection, reality would be seeing a lot clearer, but the Cuban government has covered all its faults under this connection that they have strengthen and built for over 50 years now. It is a distraction and trap that every body falls for when you mention Cuban reality, and it goes beyond the embargo issue. It is like a rooster’s fight and the smaller one is bleeding to death, but its "Patron" is making profit from it while this small cock has very little hopes…

Cuba just have to hang a little longer, long enough to give the possibility to its builders to die in peace in the land they’ve corrupted. They are old, a change of the reality now is impossibility and no matter what the cost, Cuba and its unpainted filthy walls have to hold a little longer. It is happening already they are dying naturally by the hands of time. An old generation that drank out our juice until the very end.

Yet these misfortunes are very obvious but foreigners still call Cuba an extraordinary place where none of these realities bleed through enough to call for help.

Yes, they don’t have freedom, yes, they are forced to steal from us and there is a lot of scammers, and yes, they can not say what they think out loud and yes, they have become ignorant swimming in a pool of false education by merely not knowing, and only guessing about the out side world.

But yet they look so happy because they smiled a lot and they dance a lot and they drink what they can, a lot, and they joke a lot and they speak loud and their kids are sweet and the women are beautiful and sexy and they know how to make love and make love, a lot. And they make us smile and there is the sun and the blue sky almost every day. That helps them evade their own cold and empty reality.

There is something about Cuba, and before another smart-ass mentions that I am wasting my time by writing this, with my very bad English and Cuba is like Africa, a complicated matter that nobody can change I’ve got to say, there is something about Cuba…. And I hope that THAT something helps us bloom through the bubble that covers us without chattering the glass too much that could mutilate our bodies.