IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 20

lions, or in other agricultural movements.Old age in Cuba often means
being a member of an exceedingly
large, high-risk population.

We are before a city that many of us
have had to live in without being able to
protest or choose.
Havana is also a city of many bodies,
and for many Havana residents, like
writer Abilio Estévez, the joy of miscegenation reigns in this space, even if
many of our lives are anchored in Barcelona, New York, Miami or Cairo.It is
the tired city floating above its corporal
ruins and architecture; it is always exposed to old age. It is the walkway with
which citizens interpret themselves. It
has been shaken by time, and plays at
the seams of its enormous scars. It is
well accustomed to its poverty and difficult causes. The city is codified and
marked by its visible racial and social
boundaries; this is where anonymous
neighborhoods want to roar from their
labyrinths, as the support for the invisible.As singer Frank Delgado’s song La
Habana está de bala says, its façades
are a reflection of sadness and pain; it is
always in danger of fading away in the
many geographies, given its irritated
migratory membrane.
This reality constitutes the open veins of
a city that is always visible in many
places within our insular geography.
Social mobility is limited, as is intergenerational mobility, too, given there
are public policies to foment the ability
to break down poverty’s trap, and those
of its vicious circles. Communities and
bodies are a serious indicator of our
social body’s deterioration. In the
meanwhile, indifference is a crime.

The information media, like Cubadice
or Cubadebate, never talks about this
cruel reality. It is a hidden truth because
poverty and indigence are phenomena
typical of capitalist societies, for the
revolutionary press. ‘Poverty,’ ‘indigence’ and ‘begging’ are considered
obscene words and are prohibited in the
Revolution’s vocabulary. I don’t recall
ever having seen media denouncing
realities as cruel as this. For high level,
political leaders and their alignment
policies, poverty does not exist; their
only option is to translate it into talking
about an at-risk or vulnerable population. For many of these people, their
lives might be marked by emotional
dysfunction, depression, alcoholism,
anxiety, and psychiatric disorders. Yet,
when we get involved in the real stories
of their lives, when they reveal to us
and show off their scars, the pain can be
even greater. They are visible in each
and every furrows of this Havana we
breathe every single day. These images
we see every day do not lie; there is a
painful crease behind each one of them;
they are part of a legion of invisible
Cubans who are anchored to an everyday nothingness as part of the social
history of a city inhabited by intimately
ferocious landscape.

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