Cuba: Nostalgia, mistrust, hope

The philosophy of scents

By Luis Sexto

Politics could be a feature of olfaction, if we realized that Cuba can be perceived in various scents.

The emigrants who stand at the point in Key West that marks 90 miles between Cuba and the United States seem to smell the scent of nostalgia. And if it weren’t just the longing for their native land, for their friends and their language, nostalgia might not be dangerous. It might only presage a poetic state. But many of those who lean on the seawall of remembrance, recall a Cuba without revolution. And that feeling of emptiness becomes a potential for violence, a dangerous desire for revenge.

Likewise, in Havana, many of those who sit on the Malecón seawall to spend a cool evening and point their noses northward detect the scent of mistrust or hope, depending in the first instance on a political attitude favorable to the revolution and in the second (to an appreciable degree) on their economic aspirations.

Maybe those three — nostalgia, mistrust and hope — are the basic scents that the sea air offers Cubans beyond the Straits of Florida and Cubans on this side, where I write.

Upon reaching such conclusion, one laments the random geographic luck that placed the isle of Cuba in this crucial position — so true to America, as Martí said — a crossing between the Old World and the New. It is easy to acknowledge it. It is an uncomfortable fate to live only a few paddle strokes from a country that achieved such influence and power that we Cubans see it, some as “the Promised Land” and others like the origin of every threat and danger.

It seems clear that the violent, vengeful phase of nostalgia in Miami directly influences the scent of mistrust that many Cubans perceived yesterday and smell today in the aggressive language of the media of the so-called “exile” and, of course, of the institutions in Washington. After 50 years of argumentation, there is justification for the suspicions over what we can expect from that citadel of counter-revolution that Miami became in 1959. So, as long as the ideological-political conflict is stated in hostile terms, the Cubans on the island will find it easy to defend themselves: they recognize the enemy, adjust their gun sights, and find in the possibility of aggression their justification for resistance.

In turn, it is not so simple to annul or reduce the intensity of the scent of “hope” that other Cubans believe they smell when they open the windows of their noses with a similarly nostalgic gesture but with a different nostalgia — a longing for what they don’t know, yet consider as the “open-Sesame” to personal prosperity. Emigration, legal or illegal, then becomes a basic formula enabling those who hope to live presumably better to touch their “American Dream.”

How can socialist Cuba block the scents that, wrapped in the white clouds, drift in, tempting many, particularly young people, in disquieting numbers? At this phase of hostilities between the two shores, gun barrels solve nothing. I am not the first one to affirm this. And it seems to me that, despite any apparent doubt in the inhabitants of the Cuban archipelago who have not had a chance to assume a position other than that of a “critical spectator,” the more lucid thinkers in Cuba tend to realize that, in order to reduce the clandestine smuggling of people and the effects of the migratory adjustment law that encourages it, it is paramount that we do in the country whatever needs to be done so nobody has to seek abroad what he could have — even if modestly — inside the island. And without waiting for rationality to germinate among the advisers and executors of political power in Washington.

For the past 20 years, Cuba has resisted, following a strategy that has relied mostly on time, the time that might bring us a stroke of luck, a magic touch that might bring from our subsoil the wealth that could finance our needs and even our inefficiencies. But time also fails to bring us what we expect. And with a notable anxiety over the possibilities of domestic development, we perceive a new scent: the need to modify, right now, those economic structures that foster a creative response to the present urgencies.

As I said once, in Cuba things are sometimes conceived, mulled over, and approved behind the scenes. Let us not forget that mistrust in the actions that originate in the United States and among U.S. supporters conditions any domestic movements. Aside from the bureaucratic obstacles and distortions, which are a different type of foe, caution surrounds the decisions that sometimes we believe to be too slow.

Beware! says a suspicious combatant. The enemy is aware of every crack. But Cuban society, rigid for many years, shakes off the starch that immobilized it, out of loyalty to a socialist paradigm already disqualified by history. Let me clarify. It is not that socialism failed, but that the way to institute it was frustrated in Europe by its inability to regulate itself.

In effect, Cuba continues to move, albeit slowly, within the logic of its political olfaction — change what is obsolete, without compromising the solidity of the Revolution’s power. The recent Decree-Law No. 268, about holding multiple jobs, is, in my opinion, a fundamental measure, along with the decree about the leasing of land in usufruct.

From now on, if the bureaucracy doesn’t hold us back, the individual will have more space to decide and define his situation at home. Nobody will have to wait for the generous hand of the State for an increase in salary or pension, which may have to be postponed. If you need it, or if you want to live more comfortably, you can work more.

For the first time, the principle that work is the true source of wealth and well-being begins to formalize in a social and legal body, with no limitations other than those that tend to preserve legality, escorted by reason.

Maybe I exaggerate, or maybe I am — just this once — too optimistic, but a scent of renewed hope wafts in the rather thick air of Cuba; not the hope that certain dissatisfied souls seek abroad in the gold leaf of a very costly promise, but the hope that begins to grow as a premise to transcend insufficiency and solidify the scent of justice the Revolution brought us.

My nose believes that disenchantment would be the equivalent of ruination.

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist, winner of the 2009 José Martí journalism award, writes a regular column every Friday in the newspaper Juventud Rebelde.