The future will not end

Havana, May 28.—I had the opportunity to tour some German cities for brief, intermittent periods, starting in 2010. I wrote some reflections for my blog, and later combined them with others in my book Cuba, Revolution or Reform? (Abril Publishing House, 2012 / Ocean Sur, 2018). I walked through Berlin, a city that at the time seemed like a museum of anti-communism, with its fragments of the wall, its reconstructed "surveillance" posts, its intentional posters, and the stalls selling medals, epaulettes, caps, and symbols of defeated socialism. I was deeply impressed to find a Soviet flag, worn and faded, exposed to the elements on the wall of a building, with a hardly credible legend: "the last flag to fly in the Kremlin." and very close—a copy, I suppose—to the bronze plaque of Leonid Brezhnev, former General Secretary of the CPSU, which must have been in the house where he lived in Russia. Symbolic (medieval) war trophies.

I returned to those notes after reading Jorge Enrique Jérez Belisario and Dania Díaz Socarrás's book, Donde se acaba el futuro (Where the Future Ends) (Editorial Ácana, Camagüey, 2024). I met Jorgito in that second decade of the new century. He was still a journalism student, and his online activism was based on three already evident virtues: willpower, intelligence, and commitment. The "magic" equation was completed with Diana, his life partner and ideals. The book, which has a substantial epilogue by Abel Prieto, has a subtitle: Lives that Changed After the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

The narrative of the restoration is especially vengeful; its purpose is to turn history around, demolish any possible claim to socialist utopia, make the black holes, artificially enlarged, swallow up the natural lights of the social experiment, to articulate a neon lighting, bright and colorful, to replace it. If capitalism is good in anything, it is in the substitution of the essential by the superfluous, of truth by the shard of dynamited truth: that tiny and deadly piece of truth, more false than lies.

Jorgito and Diana interview 16 East Germans whose lives changed drastically with the fall of the wall, men and women who face the media distortion of their lives, who suddenly lost the tranquility, security, and dreams that inspired their lives. Some of them participated in the marches against the imperfect socialist state, and they were hopeful about the offers from the West, although they lived (if we speak of the material) much better than us. Others were teachers, journalists, police.

There is a black German, as she prefers to define herself, daughter of a Germanic and an African. And a gay man. Both sometimes felt the discrimination of the "normal", but they were protected by the socialist state. Now they are alone, exposed to the proliferation of racist and homophobic groups. Now they regret what is lost.

Because that narrative does not begin with the fall, precedes it, piercing for years our senses until they diminish, leads us to desire a change, any change, in order to get rid of imperial punishment; It confuses, accumulates weariness and doubts in the real stage while showing the splendor of a prop stage; it assaults, impedes, blocks, and accuses the system of being incapable; but it reaches its maximum expression in the days of revenge. The thirst for revenge of the displaced capital is enormous; it comes to satisfy itself, to make sure that it will never again be deprived.

In the face of the overflowing lights of capitalism, constant and prolonged blackouts offer the desired spectacle. In my book I quoted a fragment of the novel The Confidence of the Communist writer Ana Seghers, an unusual "explanation" of the reasons for the glare that caused in the East, without blackouts, the West Berlin:

—Look, if you go out of the station at night and immerse yourself in the lights of the city, you will see that they have no comparison with the stars. The stars are only dots, all of the same color and very far away, besides. But in that city you see signs of light of all colors. They are on and off, click, clack. And behind the windows, night and day, there are amazing things.

Thomas laughed, but Pumi remained serious:

-Only in so much light one feels truly happy. And after having looked well, you think: «We have everything we need here».

The crisis forces us to walk, with our hands tied, along the edge of the cliff. Imperialism wants to push us. It does not use that word. It says: "we want to help them," to fall, of course. The provocateurs pay (and safe) write proclamations from Miami and Madrid. They insult and threaten the Cubans who "do not leave", even though life becomes difficult, distressing. In these days of Trumpeter fury, they have been persistent in calling for revolts, dreaming of an impossible war of the people against the people, to justify intervention. The representative of the empire on the Island walks around the country haranguing those who have already been bought. They are few. As pointed out by Johana Tablada, a MINREX official, one has to be "cynical, ignorant, cowardly or malicious" in order not to recognize the link between Cuba’s serious problems and the measures implemented by imperialism since 2019.

We will defend the Revolution until our last breath and with it, national independence. Unlike East Germany, which was annexed by the West, both territories of the same nation, Cuba would be swallowed up by US imperialism. The Germans interviewed in this book warn us: "Do not let them tell you that socialism has failed -says, for example, Margitta Zellmer. Of course, socialism was not perfect in the GDR and other socialist states; it was a premature socialism, but it was certainly better than what we have now. Capitalism is inhuman". In the face of doubt, I recommend reading these testimonies. In Cuba, the future will not end. (Text: Enrique Ubieta Gómez/ Cubasí) (Photo: Cubasí)