IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 88

Identity and Culture

Cuba-USA: How the Wall
was Brought Down
Verónica Vega
Writer
Havana, Cuba
A cartoon was purposefully circulated
regarding what was announced on December 17th, 2014. The reestablishment
of diplomatic relations after more than
half a century between the U.S. and Cuba, home of mephitic slogans and walls,
was summed up in a powerful image of
the resistant faith of an entire people not
only in their saints, but also in its past.
We first generations of the Revolution
grew up in the midst of shortages, rationing systems, empty stores, and stories
about the splendor of a Havana in which
the pride of its architecture, lighted
signs, and Reader’s Digest magazines
remained as vestiges of a world seemingly erased in a few rounds by a group
of Messianic bearded men. A friend was
walking with his father in the Parque
Central and stopped, paralyzed, as if
he’d received a blow to his chest. When
he asked him what was the matter, he
said: “It’s that I just remembered how
this was before” (before 1959). At
school, we were made to repeat: “Cuba
sí, yanquis no” [Cuba yes, Yankees no],
convinced of the fact that all privation
and dysfunction was because of the
blockade imposed by the ruthless mon-

ster of which Martí also had come to
know its entrails well. It didn’t matter if
more people were risking their lives on
fragile rafts all the time, to reach this
monster. Sometimes they were even our
friends and relatives. At the same time
neon signs (prototypes of a pernicious
sparkle) disappeared, cartoons like Betty
Boop, Woody Woodpecker, Popeye and
others were silently replaced with other
Soviet ones; U.S. movies were replaced
by Russian, Czech, Hungarian, German
and other, Soviet-bloc films. Even
though we were privileged because we
saw excellent works, Cubans had to
swallow an undigested, imposed culture,
and find his or her release through jokes,
as usual, like the one by famous humorist Enrique Arredondo, for which he was
punished: “If you behave badly, I’ll
make you watch Russian cartoons!” The
height of extremism came when the program for learning English, an international language, was replaced by a Russian one that never really took shape,
much less did it take off. All of this happened in a society in which words like
“pullover” was said in lieu of camiseta
and “frigidaire” instead of nevera.
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