Forgive the Castro Regime? Never!

Forgive the Castro Regime? Never! / Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez
Posted on January 23, 2016

Cubanet, Luis Cino Álvarez, Havana, 11 January 2016 — I am a resentful
person. I have to admit that, at least in this regard, the officials
from State Security are correct, they who have condemned me as such
during multiple, more or less menacing, interrogations throughout the
past almost-20 years.

I am full of resentment against that calamitous abomination that some
people still call "the Revolution." And how can I not be? I would have
to be a masochist, or emulate Mother Teresa of Calcutta, to love the
perpetrators of the system that has crushed my life for as long as I can
remember.

I would have to be exceedingly hypocritical to say that I am willing to
reconcile with and forgive those who have never, in the slightest
way—arrogant as they are—asked for forgiveness.

I am not a man given to hatreds and vengeances, but I cannot abide
duplicity and hypocrisy. So leave me to my resentment which, in the
reasonable doses in which I dole it out, will do no more harm than it
already has; on the contrary, it helps me to keep going and not give up.

I cannot forgive those who thought themselves infallible, with a
monopoly on the country, keepers of the keys to Paradise, with the right
to decree the collective, obligatory happiness of the masses—all at the
price of turning us into cogs in a machine, with no freedoms nor hope,
yoked to the wagon of a mistaken history.

I cannot help but begrudge those who caused our individual dreams and
aspirations—grand or simple, but valid and legitimate as any others—to
be indefinitely deferred, annulled in the name of the Revolution, the
Homeland and Socialism: all of which, according to what they said, were
of a piece, despite the fact that the words did not rhyme, and we knew
they could not rhyme.

I cannot be at peace with those who, in keeping with catchphrases that
invariably posited death as the alternative, divided our families and
pulverized our values, turning us into impoverished, vulgar riffraff,
cynical and suspicious, perennially wandering in the desert…

My love for my neighbor (why deny it) is insufficient to be lavished
upon those who fucked up my life: those teachers who, applying
punishments prescribed by Comrade Makarenko, pretended to be forging The
New Man; the sergeants in the compulsory military service; the
psychiatrist-prison guards; the jailers at police precincts; the
snitches who compiled exhaustive reports on me; all those who were wont
to expel me from anyplace because of ideological divergences; the agents
of the political police who "tend" to me, that is, who watch me even
while I sleep…

Of no use have been the many times that they have tried to convince me
that all the bad things that happened were not the Revolution's
fault—no, Man, of course not, they happened because of those extremists
of which Lenin spoke—opportunists, as he called them—and all kinds of
other shit. As if such as these were not the ideal subjects of a system
like this!

Do not tell me anymore that those terrible events were errors—because in
those "errors" have our lives been lost, and there is no getting them back…

I do not resign myself to having been one more rat in the Castros'
laboratory. The damages have been irreversible, and I do not believe
that at this point they can be compensated.

Therefore, all we have left is the memory of what was and what could not
be, because they prevented it, by force.

The poet José Mario—one of those who suffered the severities of the
UMAP*—was right when he said that that those explanations of how "things
were not as bad as they really were, it was a matter of errors committed
by some extremists," are worse than forgetting.Do not expect me to
slobber. I am one of those who do not forget. I cannot, nor do I want
to. For this reason, I am a resentful person. And proud of it.

luicino2012@gmail.com

Translated by Alicia Barraqué Ellison

Source: Forgive the Castro Regime? Never! / Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/forgive-the-castro-regime-never-cubanet-luis-cino-alvarez/