Practicing the Truth in Cuba
Verónica Vega Writer Havana, Cuba
State and Society
I
t is said that truth is relative. And it is true, if it refers to the individual appreciation of reality, which will always be subjective. But there is a truth that describes what we all perceive with our physical senses, as well as the facts and their consequences. In an interview for Diario de Cuba, the lawyer, former diplomat and polyglot Gabriel Calaforra told me:
" Nothing works here, and people have gotten accustomed to it, but it ' s an unsustainable situation. No country can be like that indefinitely. The number one problem is to rescue moral values. The Cubans were never very honest, but the revolution made the lie official. You just need to watch TV. The children are obliged to say that they will be like Che Guevara and the parents, that they are on the revolution side... Everyone knows that’ s a lie, but that’ s what must be said."
Now that the emblematic figure of Fidel Castro was relegated by biological laws, it is useful to analyze the balance that the official lie has left in the Cuban identity. Friends and acquaintances agree that the system in which the bornafter-1959 Cubans grew up has atrophied the interpretation of reality and made us ignorant of the logic behind an organized society. This concerns not only the illicit actions attributed to migrants from the Isle and the vulgar attitude and bad language that already threatens to become a Cubanness ´ stamp. Apparently, there is something more in the distorted vision with which Cubans go abroad for knowing other worlds. Respecting the property of others and the space of others— which includes avoiding annoyance with an unnecessary brushing against another’ s body, as well as socially climbing through honest work and reliability, paying debts, complying with agreements and honoring the promises— is a missing value in their thought and by extension, in their actions. An old woman summed up this phenomenon with a lapidary phrase: " The new man got the worst of the old man." By agglutinating the symptoms of the disease, it could be said that the ultimate cause is the absence of truth. The magazine Espacio Laical dedicated a dossier( in its first 2016 issue) to the dialogue that took place at the Cultural Center Felix Varela under the title " Living in the Truth ". I regretted not having heard about this event, where a priest, a psychologist, a journalist, a lawyer and the magazine’ s editor participated. Especially because the questions suggested by such a hot topic to me neither appear in the presentations nor were formulated by the public. I would have asked the psychologist what traumas are generated in a child who, since day care, is indoctrinated in a political ideology beyond the children’ s understanding; how any personality can be affected by discovering that what you see is so far apart from what you are told to say, and by receiving an education focused on training to memorize and to repeat. Even history is taught with pre-made characterizations of its heroes. Students can neither judge nor comment. Since
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