The light, bro, the light

Havana, Oct. 31. - At dusk on the second day, the woman went out onto the balcony of her apartment to bang on a pot. She insisted for a few minutes, but no one in the neighborhood supported her. The remote organizers of the expected counterrevolutionary “soft coup” were betting that a massive popular protest would take place. The abrupt fall of electrical services throughout the country had shaken Cubans, although in many provinces power outages were already common.

The lack of fuel, spare parts and financing forces workers of the country's thermoelectric plants to do magic to repair the machinery as much as possible and keep it running. The blockade strangles the economy, and social networks, managed from Miami, blame the government for mismanagement. The few attempts to create chaos in the capital were quickly controlled. The Cuban people suddenly understood the magnitude of the war they face. Almost in unison, a hurricane touched the caiman's snout, and it slowly crawled along the northern coast of eastern Cuba.

The miracle happened: instead of street protests, people organized themselves into solidarity chains. No thoughtful analyst of the contras could have foreseen it, because to do so they would have to believe in the people. Solidarity is not an attribute exclusive to Cubans, but it is an essential attribute of the Revolution. Those who mobilize when the Homeland needs it, whether they live in Cuba or not, those who go out to defend the lives of strange and distant peoples, are children of the Revolution.

It is an enigma, but without light and without water, Cubans look in their shop windows for clothes, cans of preserves, the money that is not abundant, and they give it away without further ado, without proof of good conduct, without photos for the press, because they do not aspire to any certificate; they give away not what they have left over, they share what they have. It doesn't matter if they are Christians or communists (or Christian communists); what counts in times like this is that they are Cubans. People who formed the Revolution. Suddenly the light returned in some urban centers, and while the contras spread false news to provoke discontent, the people, calm, trusted. Sometimes, the fake news was terrifying: the dam's dike broke —they announced— and the desperate residents gathered their loved ones and fled the place. Someone testified: while some flee, the Chapman advances towards the dam. Why does the counterrevolution have to lie, to fabricate false news? Isn't it proof of its double orphanhood: of arguments and ethics?

Everything happens like a waterfall, one event drags the other, the waterfall is inevitable. The Revolution is alive, it beats in every donation, in every anonymous delivery; the war, now visible, cannot divide us. An admired journalist wrote: it is a new October Crisis that we are living. I don't know that reference was too media-driven, too apocalyptic. There are no nuclear bombs at stake, although perhaps there are, the world is very small. It fits in the palm of God's hand. And in the Middle East, Israel, with the complicity of the United States, launches rockets on Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Syria. Nuclear weapons await the first madman, or desperate person, or fascist, who activates them. Never carry a gun on your waist if you do not intend to use it. What will happen next?

I'm not changing the subject, Palestine is Cuba, or vice versa. Does anyone think that it can isolate itself, that it can draw a protective circle of ashes? The point I want to emphasize is that Cuba, that is, the Cuban Revolution, lives and faces an open war, and all Cubans are in the trench, in that of the Homeland, or in that of the Invader.

The French-Iranian activist, filmmaker and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, awarded this year with the Princess of Asturias for Communication and Humanities, used, I hope to her dismay, as a piece in the demonization of Iran, even though I understand her gender demands, expressed an idea that I share in her acceptance speech: “For a long time I have believed that the key for any human being to be able to live with dignity, to never suffer brutality or humiliation because of their sex, ethnicity or colour, was education. But didn't Goebbels have a PhD in philosophy? Hadn't Dr Mengele taken the Hippocratic Oath? Are we wrong when we define education? Perhaps before educating our children to be economically and socially successful, we should teach them that true success lies above all in humanism.”

Now that the UNEAC Congress will be held in a few days, in particularly difficult circumstances for the country, and I would say, for the planet, at a time when fascism seems to return, even raised by its former Ukrainian and Jewish victims, among others, and by those who intend to use them again to reconquer territories or expel citizens of different skin colors, her words make sense.

Knowledge doesn't save us. The bookish erudition that José Martí abjured and warned about does not save us. Cuban intellectuals have the obligation to get involved in the most just causes, those of Cuba and those of the world, to tread the dust and mud of life, to bring together in a single beam of light truth, justice and beauty. Only the Homeland, which is “that portion of humanity that we see most closely and in where we were born,” according to Martí, saves us. The light of a city can be turned off or on, but the little flame that appears in our eyes cannot die in us; that is the light within, the one that saves us. May the poet Sigfredo Ariel excuse me for the free interpretation of his verses (that is what poetry is for):

These days are going to be imagined

for the gods and the teenagers who will ask these days

for them.

And the names and the dates

and our blunders will be erased

and the light will remain, bro, the light

and nothing else. (Text: Enrique Ubieta Gómez/ Cubasí) (Photo: Cubasí)