Clock, don’t tick the hours

By Luis Sexto

While poets usually are good at describing images, they are not always so lucky when they try to philosophize. Was the bard who bequeathed his children “time, all the time” wrong? As literary architecture, that poem is unimpeachable, although in reality no living being could dispose of all the time, as an absolute category. But how harmful could a poet’s mistake be, if compared with, let’s say, the mistake of politicians when they think they have time, all the time?

Time, then, seems to be the dimension that observers and fortune-tellers paint as the stage where the revolutionary government and the Party will decide the future of socialism in Cuba. It is presumed that time will be an ally at certain times and that later it could become an enemy of politics, depending on whether the politicians overrate or underrate it.

That is related to the current situation in Cuba. Is the country taking too long to embark on its self-renewal and concretize the changes in concept and structure that, when announced as immediate tasks, were praised as the most revolutionary proposals to date?

Because I write from Cuba and am committed to the fundamental ideas originally expressed in 1959, I have a flexible and open mind. I am aware that certain answers cannot be worded in a definite Yes or No, at the risk of inexactitude and injustice.

That is why I continue to believe that the situation in Cuba today cannot be simplified in the media propaganda that pictures Cuba as “a hell,” combining unethical equations and science-fiction formulas. Nor can it be defined in the unctuous, unilateral speech that, when defending Cuba, describes it as an advanced station of paradise on earth.

Analyses that are militantly severe, absolute, usually tilt to the extremes, and, from the extremes, the emphasis usually falls on irrationality, be it among rightists or leftists.
I’m inclined to suggest that, because of a certain impatience spurred by reality itself, the most usual perception in Cuba considers the concretion of that “revolution within the revolution,” of “changing what needs to be changed” a bit belated. But, is it true that everything stays the same in Cuba? Is the nation dull and cold? Tired? Enthused? Or failed?

“No,” would answer many who, from retirement or administrative work, remember the feat that prompted them to become part of a unique historic process and share the glory of educating, laying down roads, building schools, factories, above all, justice and winning brotherly wars. All this while resisting invasions, sabotage and blockades conceived, paid for and fueled by the United States, where one of its cities (one of the least important in 1959 and the closest to Cuba) became the capital of the counter-revolution in Latin America.

I have previously referred in this space to the fact that “something always is happening” in Cuba, even though the decision-makers may find it inconvenient to insist on what is agreed to, approved and applied. One has to be very sharp to bring together, as pieces of a single strategy, diverse events related to the essence of the Cuban system.

The decrees about land and its multiple usage, and the decision to pay wages according to output confirm the willingness to dismantle the rigidity of the economy and the Cuban society. We must also take into account the adjustments that tend to eliminate egalitarian paternalism and productive entities that are inefficient and ineffectual, such as many Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs).

Although this information may sound trivial, in several markets the buyers buy, freely and regularly, potatoes for a peso a pound, “national currency.” If we consider that this tuber was for decades strictly and jealously rationed, we realize that its liberation suggests something more than an occasional surplus.

Silence long ago became a “social pact” that localizes the extent of measures and debates, because the defensive scheme that tries to freeze any internal movement that threatens national unity and consequently facilitates an opening to Washington’s never-denied and never-eased hostility is very old. And that hostility is shared by Washington’s legionnaires in Miami, although in that city most of the Cuban immigrants would rather find spaces in the facilities of developed capitalism (now diseased) than combat communism.

That group, a bit indifferent or less aggressive toward the government of its native country, could become a sort of balancing force if it questioned the “junk food” of anti-communism or anti-Castroism dispensed by the Miami media. At least for family reasons. Most everyone has left behind, in Cuba, his or her parents, siblings, uncles and aunts, that long familial chain that distinguishes our culture.

The fate of today’s Cuba will depend on all its citizens. Because, in effect, most of the population is not fragmented in the so-called diaspora – it lives in Cuba.

Of course, to adhere to the idea that the U.S. tricks can be neutralized only with immobility or silence is the equivalent of a knee-jerk reaction. Isn’t the lack of discourse and information in Cuba today related to the domestic plane? No doubt; the enemies of socialism gather mostly in Union territory.

Some also live on the island. I dismiss the so-called “dissidents,” who make a rascally living behind the policies sponsored from abroad. What I mean is that, sometimes unconsciously, the boxed-in mentality of some revolutionaries tries to slam the brakes on dialectic change, in the belief that everything done since 1959 is perfect.

The rectification or readjustment of Cuba’s socioeconomic organization, within the scheme of a united society, scares some, because it constitutes a correction of the distance vis-à-vis the discredited dogma. And it horrifies others, because it implies a hierarchical deverticalization of society to allow democratic horizontality, and that might eliminate authoritarian methods and privileges copied from extinct doctrines.

That circumstance, so delicate for those who try to sew a “torn shirt” that could rip elsewhere, explains, in my opinion, the correctness of the slow pace exemplified by the postponement of the Sixth Communist Party Congress, without whose approval little could be remade in the structural aspect, and the still undetermined date of the Party Conference, the stage previous to the Congress.

However, even within the lack of definition, I believe I see that in Cuba there is a considerable tendency among popular, intellectual and political sectors to advocate the urgency of a socialist restructuring that would not imply concessions to the United States or disloyalty to the basic principles of the revolution.

One line of thought is evident: if the ability to think ever disappeared from Cuba, there would still be suspicions about the clean intention of U.S. interests regarding Cuba. The average Cuban intuits that, once the island returns to the Yankee back yard, it will be assigned the role of another Las Vegas or another Miami, a center for prostitution, gambling and drug trafficking.

That was the role of Cuba before 1959, the role that the chemists in the ideological kitchens in Miami and Madrid offer as prosperous and free. Prosperous and free in the memories of those who were prosperous and free examples of a small middle class with cars, expensive apartments and vacations in Florida, at the expense of the generalized poverty of unemployed workers; farmers expelled from their lands or murdered by land rustlers and rural policemen; families evicted from their homes because they couldn’t pay the rent; illiterate children, teenagers and adults; towns without electricity, without doctors or teachers; maps without highways.

Having said all this about time: Is Cuba late in its reclaimed and planned socialist renewal? I have suggested explanations so my readers may reach their own conclusions.
In particular, I share the common criterion: time, our ally, could become our main enemy, both if we hasten and if we postpone the solution by waiting for a more benign climate. In politics, arriving early is bad; arriving late is even worse. Although, as another poet accurately wrote, perhaps when we think that we have all the answers, all the questions will change.

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist who won the 2009 José Martí Award, is a regular contributor to Progreso Semanal/Weekly.