Two Griefs, Two Citizens, Two Countries

Two Griefs, Two Citizens, Two Countries / Luis Felipe Rojas
Luis Felipe Rojas, Translator: Raul G.

From time to time, in the middle of conversations between Cubans, a
couple of unanswered questions spring up: when did we become two
countries, two citizens, two forms of enjoying ourselves, of suffering
or of living, simply? There are those who say that it happened around
1989, when the utopias and the innocence vainly fell to the ground from
a wall which stopped existing a long time before.

In Cuba, the neighborhood know-it-alls assured that it happened around
1992. The discussions begin and, with them, so do the adapted maps in
which individual calamity comes together with collective calamity
without any visible seams. If there really was a Special Period…what was
the previous one called?

Two ways of doing tourism: the beaches prohibited to Cubans and a couple
of stick huts within the "popular camping" scene for the socialist and
proletariat vanguard; a bunch of channels on the satellite television
service of luxury hotels and that televisual insult, adapted to four
missiles which repeat the same thing every day and which no one can
stand; comfortable and safe airplanes, cars, and buses against vehicles
which are re-built and re-nailed onto the nostalgia of the 40′s; two
kinds of diets: the one which every human being should consume, which no
one should ever prostitute themselves for, and the other, the one they
sold us wrapped in the most criminal of collective rations (a smelly oil
to lubricate our stomachs, some grains and a bit of brownish-gray sugar)
and which we accepted as an act of state subordination without any
historical antecedents. A parliament, a Single Party which aims to
govern, which dreams of popular respect and acknowledgement and which
drowns in the anonymous massacre which bleeds us dry through the worst
style of corruption, while the citizen-ants lift the foundations of a
civil society which, more sooner than later, will impose itself…if it
manages to escape the beatings, imprisonments, and the public scandals.

Two ways of clapping: accepting everything with resignation, tightening
our teeth and closing our eyes and ears before the puppets, saying yes,
but no, saying no, but saying yes. We scream loudly in the plaza, at the
top of our lungs, up to the point that we skin our hands of hating and
envying our neighbors so much, and yet we mumble our failure on the
oven, in silence, so that we do not lose our last rations of
respiration, like he whose life is full of pain, like he who is to blame.

Translated by Raul G.

3 July 2012

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