The Stop - A Citizen Performance

The Stop: A Citizen Performance / Lilianne Ruiz
Posted on June 15, 2014
Angel Santiesteban and Manuel Cuesta Morua

My blog appears abandoned. But that is not the case. What happens is I
want to do many thing and so I am behind in updating it. I follow what's
going on around me, I want to understand our history, our social
paralysis. I am not brave. I realize it's easy to stay home, have a hot
drink, read a book, ask others questions. The hard part is going
outside, engaging in any form of protest about the arbitrariness in
which we live.

So I thought of stopping, in that the same day and the same hour we stop
like the world stops and connect with our troubles. Because we are very
troubled, everyone has their own personal story for feeling this way.

But Cuba is a country where to protest, you have to be a hero. And I
don't like heroes. Which otherwise only appear in barbaric times. We
imagine an individual of such size made in the image and likeness of
good, as in the Bible, confronting constitutional walls like those that
make socialism, the central control the State and the a single party
political system irreversible. Wo we must change the constitution,
because there is no lack of heroes, nor are there laws to protect people
from the power of the state, Hobbes' Leviathon.

I someone goes out to protest the police come, such brutes and so
brutal, and not only are they arbitrarily detained, but right there the
strength is lost because those who have experienced it fall into a kind
of revolutionary mockery that doesn't know the value of time.

A person disappears in this time of gigantic size where nothing nothing
nothing happens. And a police officer poorer than you are and with less
awareness of his rights is who is sent to shut you up as if to say:
abandon all hope, here we mock everything, civil, political, economic
rights, everything. Here nothing nothing nothing happens.

So I propose to stop. Stop, as an individual, in the street, for example
next Wednesday at two in the afternoon, or any other day, just three
minutes, to meditate on everything that hurts us, our impotence as
individuals and as a society. No harangue, no poster, looking inward,
toward the endless abyss that seems to be our individual and national
destiny.

They do not want us to take to the streets because they send the police
brutes smelling of mother-of-pearl soap (from the bodega) and bad
breath, in their eyes the swamp of binging and the revolutionary rabble
which swallows out civic, civilizing and profoundly counterrevoltuonary
attemps. Let us stop, then.


6 June 2014

Source: The Stop: A Citizen Performance / Lilianne Ruiz | Translating
Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/the-stop-a-citizen-performance-lilianne-ruiz/