IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 103

Álvarez Rodríguez is not categorical. With impeccable rigor, she affirms that “each man or
woman who speaks from within La callada molienda takes us into a universe in which no one
has the last word, to my way of thinking.”
Too many people are implicated in this episode,
which for some could have been the most dramatic event of their lives. For others, it was the
coup de grace of an execution that was already
being carried out, for decades. Necessary or not,
both appreciations are characterized in Álvarez
Rodríguez’s book.
Even so, the title of her book is not La molienda
polémica [The Problematic Grind] or La inescrutable molienda [The Inscrutable Grind]; it is La
callada molienda. It is silence’s need to grind
something, to change something from one condition to another. Grinding is part of the process that
allows one to get to the sweetness of the sugar
cane. In the destruction of our centuried principal
industry, what Álvarez Rodríguez highlights is
the need for silence to hush the how and where of
our destination. If we begin by silencing pain,
poverty and death, it is a crime. Then we’d be able
to see the closing of the mills and so many other
factories not as the last word, but as one that consecrates its lack of piety and honor.
Pita, I know you love your mill
and we love our mills,
but don’t worry, you’re going to stronger things
than that.5
There are others ways of silencing. If a lack of
news keeps a worker from connecting his or her
tragedy with that of others, or of legitimating his
or her disagreement with the group, there are
other ways of consecrating silence. One of them
is the one that makes us feel unworthy of esteem
in the eyes of others and our own. If that is our
condition, it matters little whether or not we get
the news.
From its very beginning, the Castro State has
sought to consecrate a principle it has maintained
all these years, one that is not even absent from
the documents issued regarding the closing of the
mills. It is the one that identifies the State, Revolution and Fidel: for them, it claims all credit and

expects supreme effort from everyone else. Any
rejection of this requirement makes an individual
stateless or a counterrevolutionary, and for those
who idealized the described trinity, any sacrifice
was plausible so long as it situated one in the opposing camp. If the weapon of choice against antiCastro people was violence and social estrangement, for those who felt close to Fidel A. Castro
Ruz or the Revolution it was fear of being excluded from the process, of being associated with
that other group, the one that Castroism would
sooner or later associate with the worst, and
against those for whom there were never enough
denigrating names, “gusano” [worm] being the
best known of them.
Between the rapture and the violence, a layer of
protection was built from so precarious an intellectual synthesis, but it