Fear of White / Agustín Valentín López Canino

Fear of White / Agustín Valentín López Canino
Agustín Valentín López Canino, Translator: Unstated

The man dressed in white walks up to the exit gate at the airport. A
person with a calculating official face stops him and asks, "Do your
clothes have something to do with the Ladies in White?

The man's voice quivers. He's scared like a deer caught in the headlights.

"No, no, I do not know what you mean."

They let him pass and he boards the plane bound for Nassau, from there
to continue on a flight to the United States. He now has a Spanish
passport. As the plane takes off, he thinks: "No more white clothes, I
swear." To deny one's nationality is a means of acquiring rights.

The Cuba that is forgotten after one acquires a foreign passport, a visa
to travel abroad, or exile.

The man in white lives better than the dispossessed. He has a rental
car, and conducts unscrupulous business on his trips abroad. He knows it
is wrong, knows what is corrupt, unworthy, immoral, low, but he closes
his eyes and take advantage of the opportunities, the rights that go
with foreign passports, of course. He discards and is almost against the
opposition, he doesn't want to know about it, not even to know it
exists. There are thousands of Cubans like him, who look away from the
sinking Cuba.

Today, leaving for the United States, a young man with whom I have a
deep friendship, so I ask a favor of him that has no relationship to
politics. I cut a plastic bottle in half and place a rose inside, and
wrap up a petrified shell to send to a friend. My hunch tells me he
won't take it to the airport, which is what happens. The next day his
mother tells me.

"Please forgive him, his aunt told him not to try it. He could lose out."

It's been more than a year since I saw my daughter. The person I love
most in this world. Finally she and her husband left. With them, I
wanted to deliver a letter that he had no political connotation. Her
husband treated me almost contemptuously and reproachfully (it was his
nerves). My daughter almost fought me, it tore my heart out when she
left. For her and for the country.

Dozens of friends have gone to the United States, even some politicians
who had provided support and assistance when they were in this infernal
land, they come and go so many times it's like they're traveling from
one side to another of this city, not only do they forgot about me but
about Cuba.

Except those involved with the opposition, the rest are cultural groups,
intellectuals or scientists, including the "internationalists," minor
dictators ordered not to jeopardize their chance at the rights and they
become a repudiation brigade not to injustice about Cuba, but
suppressing any call for justice for Cuba.

I do not want anyone to come and demand the right and justice that
belongs to us, we who hourly eat the dust that plagues our nation and
allow ourselves to be torn to pieces by the tyranny that makes all
Cubans, in one way or another, scum, miserable garbage, beggars for
rights. But neither to I want so much humiliation falling on the nation
sold at the price of the scraps of power.

We Cubans do not need weapons to defeat the dictatorship and establish
democracy. We just need a minimum of honor, decency, shame, dignity, and
enough courage to exercise it. The people of Cuba have buried their
demands for justice. We don't deserve their reprimands and the dead. But
nor do I deserve that Christ went to the cross for me, and yet there he
was, martyred for my sins. But there is a difference, Christ is God and
we Cubans, who are we?

Martí's dream is my own and one can no longer say "The palms are brides
who wait, and we must place justice higher than the palms."

The palms that are left are forgotten brides, crying for their Cuban
boyfriends who abandoned them, trading them in a horrible and cowardly
exchange for American, Spanish, Ecuadorian or Venezuelan passports.
Because they lacked the courage to be Cuban in Cuba from within and
below. My Cuba and yours, the Cuba I love with tears and strength, with
all my heart and my desire for freedom, there is not enough wind to
embrace it.

1 May 2012

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