Looking desperately to the north

By Elíades Acosta Matos

At different moments in Cuban history, as if obeying an ancestral spell or a curse, a strange illness afflicts the souls of some people born on this soil. The symptoms are remarkable: a weakening of the backbone; a tendency to fall to their knees, arms extended as if praying for a miracle; profound amnesia, and a hardening of the neck muscles that forces the patients to maintain their eyes fixed on the north.

In some lands of Central Europe – including Galicia in 1871, when the trial began of a man named Romasanta, charged with turning into a wolf-man and killing 13 people – the occurrence of such inexplicable and extravagant diseases was not questioned by anyone. It is admitted, for example, that under the influence of a full moon, lycanthropy does occur in some subjects. Therefore, a civilized person can in a second become an irrational beast.

Looking toward the United States, or Spain, England and even Mexico, and while experiencing difficulties in their native country, some Cuban souls are irremissibly seized with a similar distress. They also transform. The final result is an annexationist. Could that dark tendency to not believe in the destiny or strength of Cubans, to viscerally mistrust their ability to govern themselves, coexist and develop, be the expression of a secret national lycanthropic tendency?

Luckily, the very history of Cuba, which is the first thing that the local wolf-men forget on moonlit nights, rejects that annexationism is the principal tendency of our fate as a people. There’s a reason why, against wind and sea, we have an independent motherland and haven’t been swallowed before 1959, much less afterward.

But travel through the Internet and you will find detailed projects and glamorous arguments to annex this little island to any entity, especially to the United States, in an effort to terminate the Revolution.

To a certain sector of the Cuban “contra,” not to everyone, apostasy, far from being a sin, is a virtue to wave and boast about. To resolve their political problems, this crowd would not hesitate to throw overboard an identity and a culture that were shaped with the blood, sweat and intelligence of many generations of white, black and mestizo Cubans with various religious beliefs and different political credos, united by the same love for Cuba, a faith in its people and its own destiny.

We have witnessed, inside and outside Cuba, the sad spectacle of “those carpenter’s sons who are ashamed to be what they are,” as Martí said. We have read some of the writings of those autonomists, forever eager to serve the strong and prolong the island’s subjugation, like José Ignacio Rodríguez, “the Cuban-American lawyer,” who turned the Yankee politicians against the Apostle and died up North, alone and bitter, after the Cubans who had emancipated themselves from Spain refused to follow his call.

That “mulatto mob that advocates an absolute independence,” as our people are described in a letter from one of those gentlemen, chose its own path on Oct. 10, 1868. And do you think it will break up, passively, on the say-so of a couple of con men who are skilled in con games, who have neither the vocabulary nor the brilliance nor the knowledge of those adversaries of Martí, or who plot with foreign imperialist forces to wipe out, with a stroke of the pen, the ideals that resisted the rigors of the jungle, the Spanish bullets, the overt and covert interventions, the submissiveness of some sectors of the republican bourgeoisie, corruption and despair?

The problems of the Cuban nation can only be resolved from the standpoint of its history, never against it. This truism needs to be repeated over and again. What’s obvious is that some people seem to be unable to see. Or they’d rather not see.

For example, the eminent jurist Francisco Carrera Justiz, who in 1905 published a notable work about Cuban municipalities, told The New York Times on Aug. 21, 1898, that he “opposed a Cuban republic because [he] considered it an impossibility.”

Carrera was a minister in Washington during the government of José Miguel Gómez, representing the same chimera that, years earlier, he had refused to support. From his post, he asked Philander C. Knox, Taft’s Secretary of State, to send him the records of Evaristo Estenoz, leader of the Independent Party of Color, compiled by the military intelligence service of the occupation army under Charles Edward Magoon, to use them in a trial being set up in Cuba for Estenoz’s activities.

Knox denied those records, in a letter dated June 15, 1910, more to protect the imperial archives than because of a repugnance to contribute to the climate of institutional lynching and racism that culminated in the massacre of 1912.

Today, those unable to see the national virtues and the transformers-by-convenience, like Dr. Carrera Justiz, legislate in the U.S. Congress to harden the blockade that makes their compatriots suffer. And they know this. They are the same who miss no opportunity to incite to an aggression, an invasion, or at least a wave of bombers to the cities of this little island, with farfetched allegations that we are a threat to the security of the global superpower, the most and best armed nation in the world, and that we export viruses, hackers and (don’t laugh) Somali terrorists.

They do not introduce legislative bills to help their constituents in the midst of unemployment and real estate crisis, the decline of education, the lack of medical insurance, the lack of care for the elderly, or the bursts of irrational violence that in Miami took the lives – at the hands of a young Cuban – of several young women, also Cuban.

But they have all the time in the world to legislate and propose how to asphyxiate – more and better – eleven million people for the sole sin of living in their homeland and wanting it to be free and independent.

In effect, there is something of a lycanthropic curse on these poor beings, merry stateless people by conviction and convenience who look so insistently toward the north. But Cuba is not there; it is only where there are Cubans who will defend it and carry it in their souls, rooted like a proud royal palm. Inside or outside its borders.

It lives, for example, in the modest streets of the nation, in its children and in the pocketbook of a woman who has lived for more than a decade in Spain. With eyes filled with tears and trembling hands, she showed me a wrinkled newspaper clipping she always carries, with the verses of the poem “My flag,” by Bonifacio Byrne.

Are wolf-men capable of reading? Dreaming? And loving?

Elíades Acosta Matos, a philosopher, writer and doctor of political science, is a member of the Progreso Semanal/Weekly team.