The Grandchildren Of The Revolution Aspire To A Normal Life With Neither Utopia Nor Frustration

The Grandchildren Of The Revolution Aspire To A Normal Life With Neither
Utopia Nor Frustration / 14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez

14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Guatemala, 12 October 2016 – This will be the
story of at least three stages my nation has lived through. Three
moments when the young amassed hopes, collected frustrations and used
their ingenuity to overcome obstacles along the way. Without this
renewing energy and a capacity to defy the established, we would very
likely be sunk much more deeply in a lack of rights, in surveillance and
control.

They opened the window when the door was closed, but the challenge is to
cross the threshold of freedom without subterfuges or ideological
concessions.

The first generation I want to talk about is that of my father. A train
driver, a Communist Party militant, a member of the political process
that came to power in Cuba in January of 1959. He could not choose, he
just followed the course designed by others who barricaded themselves
behind the name of the historic generation and came down from the
mountains, bearded, young, possessors of hope, in a convulsive and
memorable era.

My father was a child at the time and saw how the country around him
skipped a beat. The streets were euphoric, anthems filled every space
and in the photos from that time his contemporaries are smiling and
optimistic in front of the platform where the Maximum Leader speaks for
hours, with his index finger defiantly extended. To my father's
generation fell the heroic tasks, like the literacy campaign, the
voluntary labor to catapult the country to the highest standards of
prosperity and knowledge.

However, what most marked that time was the sensation that they were
working for the future, that all this sacrifice and energy would end up
building, for their children, a better tomorrow. They were young, they
wanted to have fun and be together, but they accepted being led and
reduced to the attitude of mere soldiers, so that those who came later
would inhabit a more prosperous and more free Cuba.

In order to achieve that dream, that generation set aside in great
measure the rebelliousness that belongs to that age, accepted a foreign
doctrine as distant as Marxist-Leninism, and offered their best years on
the altar of history. No contribution was enough, so the government
asked for more sacrifice, less individualism and above all, no complaining.

Their names were the first signed up for the so-called libreta, the
ration book for food and manufactured products that were distributed to
Cubans in identical amounts, to avoid social differences and the
appearance of that demonized middle class that Fidel Castro's regime had
erased through confiscations, stigmatization and exile.

My father could only choose atheism in a Cuba where families hid their
prints of the Sacred Heart of Jesus at the back of the room and avoided
even saying "thank God," and postponed for several decades the
celebration of Christmas. For the prevailing ideology, religion wasn't
just the opiate of the people, but endowed the individual with a
spiritual world to which the Party had no access. When Cubans escaped in
a prayer, in a supplication, the bureaucrats and materialistic theorists
lost ascendancy over them.

In every form you had to fill out to go to school or start a new job
there was the question about your religious beliefs. Many hid their
crucifixes under their shirts, emphasized that there were "trusted
comrades" and marked "no"… saying they believed in nothing other than
the Revolution, its leader and the Party. In this and other ways the
basis of the double standard that runs through Cuban society today was set.

These were the Cubans who, on becoming young adults a decade after
January 1959, filled the ranks of the soldiers who left for
internationalist wars in far off Africa. They didn't know it, but they
were just canon fodder, "toy soldiers" that the Soviet Union deployed at
will in the turbulent war scenario of the Cold War. Thousands went mad,
died, and wept in those latitudes, without a good understanding of how
the people on our island got involved in such a conflict.

But those who were also young back then had to say "goodbye" to many of
their relatives once more, when they were forced to emigrate from
Camarioca or through the Port of Mariel. Many of them, beardless and
confused, were used as shock troops to scream, at their own family
members, that official slogan with which Cubans confronted Cubans, "Out
with the scum!"

Uniformed, with military haircuts and optimistic about the future, these
young people began to have their own children, whom they nursed on the
belief that they would live in Utopia, with absolute equality and
happiness for everyone. It was my generation that would arrive in a
world where everything was decided and programmed.

I was born in the midst of the absolute Sovietization of Cuban reality.
The Three Kings of our Christmas celebration, olive oil and privacy were
all simply memories from a past that should not return. We were the New
Man that knew nothing of capitalism, the exploitation of man by man, the
market, the law of supply and demand, respect for privacy and, of
course, we also knew nothing of freedom…

We all knew, in that Cuba of the seventies and eighties, how our
classmates dressed or what they ate, because it was exactly the same, a
carbon copy, of what we ourselves ate and wore. Using the first person
singular, "I," became a problem, so we talked about "us," we were
comrades and projected collective dreams and the longings of the platoon.

With the concept of the "masses" that need to be be managed from above,
my generation was sent to schools in the countryside. A social and
teaching laboratory where we would be Cubans more committed to the
cause, people disinterested in all material things, and ready, at any
moment to exchange our schoolbooks for a gun, if the fatherland – or at
least those who called themselves the fatherland – needed us.

However, the human being in an environment of excess indoctrination
always reserves a piece of themselves, where the cacophony of power is
not heard and where no ideology has access. That redoubt, defended with
masks of complacency and hidden from colleagues, relatives or the
neighbors who might denounce you, was the refuge of our generation.

They, the powers-that-be, promised us Utopia, but we wanted to enjoy the
present. So we pretended to obey while we incubated rebellion. We yelled
the slogans like automatons and minutes later we'd already forgotten the
words we shouted. We learned to lie, to put on a mask, to unwillingly
applaud, and to promise eternal fidelity when inside there was only
apathy and doubt. In short, we learned to survive.

We came to puberty and the Berlin Wall fell. We weren't the ones
wielding the chisels and hammers that brought down the symbol of an era,
but every blow against the stones echoed in our heads. My father cried
for that communist East Germany that he knew from a trip he'd earned as
a vanguard worker, designed so he would know the future. But my
generation felt a tingling, a satisfaction…our Sugar Curtain could also
fall.

With the Communist Party Congress in 1991, in which it was accepted that
religious believers would be allowed in the only political organization
permitted in the country, we saw how our parents pulled out their old
hidden religious objects.

The hunger also came, that burning stomach that doesn't let you think
about anything else. With the implosion of the Soviet Union and the
"socialist camp," Cuba lost the subsidies and the "fair trade among
peoples" that had kept the country afloat for decades. That currency
that had bought our fidelity, that gravitational field that we orbited
around the Kremlin, vanished.

We came up against our own reality. It was hard, sad, without
expectations. Nothing resembled those projections of the future with
which my father put me to sleep when I was a little girl. His generation
had inherited a moribund doctrine and to us fell the heavy task of
burying it.

The Rafter Crisis that erupted in August of 1994 was one of the many
ways that my contemporaries found to bury that mirage. We didn't
confront power in a public plaza, nor tear down the walls of control
surrounding us. A good part of Cubans preferred the sea, the waves and
rickety boats as the path to escape.

On Havana's Malecon we watched them assemble the rafts of
disillusionment, people my father's age and the new shoots, energetic
and young but frustrated. They left, we said goodbye and the cynicism
began, the nothingness, the stage of not believing, of no illusions but
also no rebellion. We arrived at this moment in our national history
that could be called "every man for himself."

Between the sound made by the oars of the rafts that sailed the Florida
Straits and the stubbornness of the power that kept calling us to resist
the economic vicissitudes, my generation began the difficult task of
being parents. Those we brought into the world were the babies of
disenchantment: the grandchildren of those who cursed having given their
best years to a failed project and the children of a generation that
should have been the "New Man" but didn't even manage to be a "good man."

Not much can be asked of them, but the young people of today have been
better than us. The generation of my son, who is 21 now, suckled our
disbelief, heard us blaspheme in front of national television, buy in
the black market, surreptitiously escape from the public marches and
hope – in a whisper – that the future wouldn't be the one our parents
dreamed of. Because we already understood that was a golden cage in
which others had planned to lock us up.

With a touch of indifference and a shrug of the shoulders in that so
Cuban gesture that, translated into verbal language, means "Me? What do
I care?" the new generation of young people is dismantling what is left
of the Cuban system. It is doing this without heroic gestures, one could
almost say with a certain reluctance and a touch of indifference.
Nothing they say from the official podiums touches their hearts, or even
instills fear.

Unlike those who came before, today's Cubans under 25 don't know about
the ration book for manufactured products, where you could buy a single
pair of pants or one shirt per year. They barely remember hearing a
speech by Fidel Castro and haven't had to accumulate ideological merits
or brownie points at or work to be able to buy a home appliance.

Instead, they live on an island where the only valid thing is real
money, which is achieved by doing the exact opposite of what my father
once had to do to get a refrigerator, and where the black market has
crept into all spheres of life.

Almost from childhood, these Cubans of the third millennium have been
glued to a computer keyboard. Their parents bought their first computers
and laptops in the illegal market. Their first kilobytes and videogames
have come through the alternative distribution networks and represent
the exact opposite of the ideology taught to them in school.

With haircuts inspired by Japanese manga, by figures from international
show business or rebellion, today they populate our streets.

My son's generation does not seek revolutions because they already know
what they cause. They have learned to be suspicious by nature of Robin
Hood style discourses that know how to steal from the rich and divide
the spoils among the poor, but have never learned to generate wealth, to
make a prosperous nation, one with opportunities like those once
promised by that band of outlaws that came down from the mountains with
their beards and olive green uniforms.

Today they have the appearance and dreams of any young German, English,
Guatemalan. They look back with the necessary disdain and with a certain
confidence that the future will not be as predicted in the science
fiction books of the twentieth century, nor like that predicted by
totalitarian ideologies. They believe it will be, at least, a more
humane and pluralistic time, and a more free one.

When someone tells them that the Castro regime is here to stay and that
Cuba will never return to its democratic path – imperfect and risky,
like that of any nation – these Cubans living on the island today smile
and remember those impetuous young people who drove the changes in the
far off Soviet Union. Like them, they say to themselves, it doesn't
matter that the historic generation has the power, because we – fresh
and skeptical – have the time.

They grow up, go to the gym, listen to pirated music like anywhere else
on the planet, make love, take selfies, try to share their lives on the
web, and continue to live in a country where officialdom fears
information. In short, they are twenty-somethings while Fidel Castro is
in his nineties. They belong to the twenty-first century, but the old
caudillo remains a prisoner of the twentieth.

These grandchildren of the generation of sacrifice and children of the
generation of Utopia are the ones who, for the most part right now, feed
the emigration that is crossing Central America. They suffer, die and
are carried away in the hands of the coyotes while escaping the country
that, by this time, should be the paradise once promised by their elders.

These young people today are the future. They will do it their way.
Without listening to the advice of their parents. Who, under 30, follows
the path traced by others? Especially when those who preceded them were
so wrong? They are the grandchildren and children of a chimera. They
come with the necessary pragmatism of forgetting and with the indulgent
balm of forgiveness. They will live in a Cuba we never imagined, or knew
how to achieve. A country, finally, with room for everyone.

_________________

Editor's Note: Lecture given on October 6 by Yoani Sanchez in Juan
Bautista Gutierrez Francisco auditorium at Marroquin University in
Guatemala.

Source: The Grandchildren Of The Revolution Aspire To A Normal Life With
Neither Utopia Nor Frustration / 14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez – Translating
Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/the-grandchildren-of-the-revolution-aspire-to-a-normal-life-with-neither-utopia-nor-frustration-14ymedio-yoani-sanchez/