The Faith of a Blogger in Cuba / Lilianne Ruíz

The Faith of a Blogger in Cuba / Lilianne Ruíz
Lilianne Ruíz, Translator: Unstated

Especially in a country like Cuba, where there is an official voice and
a chorus of frogs who, from diverse motives, croak on the same theme, to
be a blogger could mean letting people know how you, personally, really
take this reality that surrounds us on all sides within the Island and,
in this letting people know, the hope that the fence will soon be
broken, I have to believe.

Today I am celebrating being the owner of my own time to surf the
Internet, to read other blogs, to read the comments on mine. If someone
wants an approximate understanding of the euphoria I feel to have a
piece of the Internet, you can listen to Avril Lavigne singing Smile,
which I've heard and danced to with my daughter several times since it
arrived in my house. Only today have I been able to interact with my
blog, take its temperature, read the comments. And I want to write in
response to these impressions.

First I greet Armienne, who has left me such sweet comments. Sexuality
is a path. The whore is pure freedom of the feminine Eros. Thanks for
letting me write the same poetry that I repeat, especially every Good
Friday for the Beloved, and at the same time to remind you of the
freedom of Cuba for Cubans.

I read the comments of a worker in the repressive Cuban apparatus, whom
you attacked, and I appreciate that other commentators have defended
you. What a pity not to have connected at that moment to also respond to
the sad troll.

Armienne: When we women take our sexuality to the purest plane — for
this we are more beautiful — we must cause great fear in some men who,
for the same reason, become police and soldiers. They feel horror before
the delicacy and feminine mystery, before the waning of the witch.

Our freedom lies in front of the vacuum, sexual knowledge of the
absence, which some men can read as if it was prenatal, and these men do
not become cops, or like destruction without rebirth and these men
become soldiers.

This cop knows he cannot fill you up, and much less sing before your
closed garden, persistent virginity, and so he attacks you. The curses
we toss out in this plus-de-jouir — overflowing pleasure — make us so
fiercely powerful that if they call us whores it doesn't offend us (and
we are only willing to barter it for the definitive love), and it makes
these cops from the repressive Cuban apparatus on the Internet look at
you, once again, like the ridiculous adolescents they must have been,
full of frustration at their dependence on "the measures," in which we,
at the height of our whoring, become a great mystery.

Thank you to everyone who left me comments. Some have related situations
in your lives in Cuba and this extends the significance of my posts and
I feel like I am truly sharing them.

Freedom in Cuba is locked in an ideology, repressive in itself and
violent towards others, that inhabits the conscience of so very many
Cubans. Thus, I believe in the need to entirely involve God in this
enterprise, and it will not embarrass me to repeat it even if it gives
rise to critical comments. I know of what I am speak, and whomever has
not experienced the vitality of having God as a friend and loving Jesus
of Nazareth, I feel sorry for their loss.

Indeed, there was one commentator scandalized that I recognize myself as
a Christian and yet I live my according to my own conscience and not
according to the discourse of the Vatican. The day I understand that I'm
offending God with some action in my life I simply divest myself of this
action, because Christ for me is responsibility and so, freedom. There
is no priest nor preacher between my Beloved and me, only the silent
music, the sound of solitude, as the little friar Juan de la Cruz said,
teacher of prayer and dissidence.

The theme of Cuba's freedom is not bounded on the outside, its terrain
is contained within every soul, every conscience. If I don't write in my
post when the night is darkest, the abyss most real, and death most near
that the Holy Trinity will save me, I would be lying.

And after I had this dream, of Cubans caught in traps, repressed, and
crushed by horses ridden by dark riders, and the Virgin at my side, the
most beautiful woman in creation, told me that she knew only the names
of those who suffered… as written in the Book of Life of the Lamb.

It turns out that I never found a greater sense of the Gospel than
taking part, loving my neighbor suffering in the prison cells, beaten
and repudiated in the streets by mobs led by State Security.

I write to the limits of my ability, I have to be me to believe that the
wings of the butterfly united with the Universe can produce a change in
the season. No more nor less than me in every post, secure in the
Internet as if my life off-line that I will find my friends and of the
day we will celebrate the freedom of Cubans, we will see each other in Cuba.

May 21 2012

http://translatingcuba.com/?p=18522