IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 12

The patrol chief took out his pistol and
sprayed a round with obviously bad
intentions, but not even that managed to
control the spontaneous rebellion. It seems
that the person who was filming these deeds
(thanks to which this ended up being news)
was not able to leave us any record of his
last moments: we were not able to find out
how that abusive and irresponsible police
action ended. But, whoever it was, it does
not take much imagination to figure out
what could have happened if the gun was
fired and that there might have been people
killed or wounded in the crowd. They say
the uprising that would end up dethroning
Emperor Haile Selassie, lord, judge, and
executioner of Ethiopians for fifty years,
came about after a spontaneous, popular
protest in front of an Addis Ababa gas
station, sparked by an increase in gas prices.
This is not the only example. There are
many others in history. What’s notable
about them are the kinds of fortuitous
circumstances, let’s say, that served as
detonators for the fall of long-lived
tyrannies. There is no evil that lasts a
hundred years or body that can resist it., or
so says the proverb. Yet, when it comes to a
whole society, what cannot be predicted is
the exact minute and juncture at which evil
rises to the limit of what is bearable, only to
cause the people to go in search of relief or
rehabilitation. No matter how unusual this
attempted uprising against the police in La
Cuevita, it should not have surprised the
authorities, so long as the evils endured by
Cuban society are so long-lived, serious, and
chronic, and its government is incapable of
finding solutions. In addition, although it has
not been a hundred years, those in power

have been there for over a half a century in
an uninterrupted manner. So it seems
historically logical that the valves will blow
at any moment, perhaps at the least expected
one, and under the most ordinary
circumstances. It is one thing that this is
neither desirable or even recommendable,
and quite another that we idly discard the
possibility that it could happen only because
the terror the regime has imposed till now
has prevented it from happening thus far.
Hopefully, this will be nothing more than a
baseless digression, but just in case our
circumstances act according to historical
logic, few places would be as appropriate as
La Cuevita or many other communities like
it in Havana for it to happen. In them,
people (mostly black people) live with a
rope around their necks, constantly enduring
shortages of all sorts, and tired of believing
in promises that are never kept. They are
coarse, bitter, beaten down, and full of
rancor. If anyone doubts this, all they’d have
to do is personally verify the inhuman
conditions that prevail in Havana’s tenement
yards and homes. There are many of them,
too many, and the ceaselessly increase in
number, no matter how invisible they are not
just for hundreds of thousands of tourists
who visit the city everyday, but also for
Havana’s better situated residents who live
in neighborhoods like Miramar, Siboney,
Kholy, or upper Vedado, precisely where the
regime’s leaders live with their families.
Many of these more fortunate residents have
never even passed by the hellholes in
question: huts built from rusty remains of
zinc, broken wooden boards, leftover
concrete, cloth and other cast off materials.
These hovels shelter 7 to 8 people in one

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