News SOS for Journalists Latin America Culture

Photos Photo of the Day Videos

Cuba Struggles Between Irreconcilable Extremes

The moral dilemma facing those of us who aspire to democratic change on the Island.

By Yunior Garcia Aguilera (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES — A good part of the world looks at Cuba without fully understanding what is happening on the Island or the moral tensions that run through its citizens. Some are scandalized that there are Cubans who come to wish for foreign intervention to escape the regime. Others do not understand how there are still people willing to defend, even with their lives, a system that has ruined the country and can only offer misery, surveillance, and combat orders. There are also those who view Cuba as an abstract symbol, a stage of sacrifice useful for feeding other people’s ideological nostalgias.

In Abdala, written when he was barely 15, Jose Marti defined love for one’s country as a bifurcation of angers: “the invincible hatred toward those who oppress it” and “the eternal resentment toward those who attack it.” More than a century and a half later, the Cuban drama remains trapped in that same emotional logic, though distorted by history.

A part of Cubans who long for a free Cuba concentrates their moral energy on invincible hatred toward the dictatorship—that is, toward the apparatus of control, fear, and servitude that Castroism turned into a system. Another part, made up of regime loyalists or those still trapped in its imaginary, clings to eternal resentment toward the United States, its threats, its real or imagined grievances, and the ever-invoked hypothesis of intervention. Between hatred and resentment, Cuba risks never becoming a true project of freedom, but merely an endless battlefield of grievances.

It should be said plainly: I do not want bombs to fall on the land where I was born. But neither do I wish for a regime that has destroyed the nation and represses its inhabitants to remain in power, condemning us to slow extinction. That is my moral dilemma.

From consolidated democracies, it may be........

© Havana Times