Samsara / Lilianne Ruíz

Samsara / Lilianne Ruíz
Lilianne Ruíz, Translator: Maria Montoto

I am writing in order to release my anger, because this morning Agustin
has been attacked by a mob of people from that neighborhood "El Globo"
–The Globe– in Calabazar, from where I was able to take him out by force
with love and hot meals.

He doesn't live there any more, now he lives with me. But he loves that
paradise lost between trees of mango, cherimoya (custard apples), weeds
of all sorts where the hummingbirds go to sip nectar. There we hope to
spend our retirement days, listening to the circulation of the sap
strengthen the beating of our blood, with the respiration cleaner, in
every sense, than in the city, because there is there a bit of the
eternity of the growing of leaves that mocks the unfailing, shattered
ambitions of all dictators of Cuba.

Some days ago he had an unfortunate family problem with one of his
nephews and a denaturalized son and he had to return, to face the
situation. These two young men were being spurred on by the neighbor of
the the next fence over, the son of the neighborhood's latest president
of that aberration in Cuba that is the CDRs — Committees for the Defense
of the Revolution — who envies Agustin even the ground he steps on, and
who covets that little piece of land that the State doesn't even allow
you to truly own. This morning the exemplary "cederista" ("CDR-ist"),
who to accentuate his characterization, even though it may seem a
cliché, earns a living making little stamps with images of Che, which he
later sells to tourists (one day we'll have to dig deep and work
seriously to inform the very misinformed Cubans, and the world, how
many, and for what reasons, were those executed by that dark Jacobin
Guevara when officiating as delegate of death in La Cabaña)… has led a
neighborhood throng to stand in the way of Agustin as he was leaving.

The mother of the "cederista", who suffers from lupus, which adds extra
considerations when dealing with her, whipped by the envy that she
couldn't eradicate from her prole, yelled "gusano" (worm!) and threw two
rocks at the windshield of the car Agustin was driving and broke it. To
which Agustin, logically, has been unable to respond, and as he pulled
further away he could hear the lady's son yelling, saying no one could
expect his sick mother to be held accountable.

It has been a trap. A few seconds before the stones were thrown, Agustin
had told the promoter that problems between men are resolved without so
much boisterousness and that if he wanted to fight he was willing to do
so at a distance from that crowd. To which the maker of stamps, cowardly
and vile, refused.

The authorities won't do the right thing, we're already accustomed to
that. In fact there was a police captain who made a racket about whether
if, on Agustin's little plot of land, there lived "a man of human
rights" who had to be done away with. We laugh at such stupidity and we
are not afraid.

One would have to fear them for how cowardly and stupid they are, but
when one has hope and faith in that it is not possible to permit the
dictatorship of the State in Cuba to continue intimidating you,
belittling you, humiliating you, abusing those you come to recognize as
your brothers, you put up a fight with hope in the laws of the Universe,
and in the most profound ones of the human soul, which always have
imposed themselves against those of the tyrants.

But we are also ashamed that in our country, everyday Cubans like
ourselves, even if they are policemen, suffer such a level of ignorance
that they destroy their own rights before the dictates of a single
"species" to whom it is not convenient to recognize those Rights. But it
is fair to say that on this occasion the problem has come up simply as
in the whole of Revolutionary history: someone covets another's space
and sets in motion the already rusted and crumbling mechanisms of a
society that is segregationist, ignorant, vile, incompetent, that
provokes pity for being more like beasts the men and women faithful to
their model. And that at some moment, as in every country led by a
Communist party, aggravated by the ambition of a specimen possessing an
ego such that he has tried to usurp the place of God (even as an
archetype given that they weren't nonbelievers), was able to legalize
acts of repudiation against citizens, the pogrom organized by the State,
the segregation, the arbitrariness, the ideology that biases the
perception of the world, of rights, of duties, and turned into a social
practice all that a healthy society would condemn: Where is he, in what
prison, the Revolutionary Communist son of a bitch who attacked with a
machete an oppositionist of the regime, over there in Oriente, last
year? Those neighbors, the Security of State decorates (with honors);
but the truth, before the civil law of the civilized world, is that he
gravely injured with extreme violence another human being and should
have gone to jail for that.

A sentiment of enormous revenge is born: "Vengeance is mine, I will
repay". A need to once more embrace hope: Blessed are those who hunger
and thirst for justice.

And an overwhelming nostalgia for another Cuba, a Cuba where the law
won't be political, nor military, nor mafioso, nor tyrannical. Cuba
turned into a civilized country, where there exists citizen security and
the respect for Human Rights and a Civil Society, holding clear notions
of what today forms the dark part of our vocabulary: civil rights.
Liberty, liberty, liberty. Responsibility, decency, honesty, respect for
the law, peace. There is none of that in Cuba, only the series of
ideological artifices that have attempted to usurp the meaning of the
most handsome words to be born after a painful birth in our mistreated
humanity. Why must I continue crying over nostalgia for the truth?

Translated by: Maria Montoto

June 5 2012

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