IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 89

Many of us half our family ‘on the other
side’ (in the U.S.), and we anxiously
awaited their letters, pictures of the forbidden country, and even Chiclets that
would melt while en route, soiling the
envelopes. We would hear the oldest
folks nostalgically say: “Before, you
could go to Miami to have lunch at a
restaurant and be home on the same
day.” That same Miami whose Cuban
population was growing became a capitalist version of the island as a result of
the inertia of rootedness. The height of
contradiction between the propaganda
and a sense of collectivity took place on
an ad containing children, on a fence in
front of the Interests Section (SINA) that
said: “We are happy here.” This proclamation caused the spreading of a mordant joke that if we are happy here (and
this included a gesture and complicit
gaze), imagine over there.
Death by silencer
Such was the phrase that Cuban writer
Reina María Rodríguez used in her missive on the “little email war” of 2007. To
revert its’ meaning, and thus accentuating the paradox, silence cannot block
reverberation, the continuation of life.
Curiously, the immoderate and subjective sympathy on the part of the neighbor to the North stemmed from the same
generations trained in hate, thanks to a
careful and sweetened version of Cuba’s
history. Even the origin of our own flag
is made to vanish: it has been extremely
used and abused to exacerbate a Manichean concept of patriotism. Our school
curriculum never mentions that its creator, Narciso López, conceived of it while

in exile in the United States, and that it
had an annexationist connotation; not
even that its blue stripes represent the
three departments into which Cuba was
then divided; the white stripes, purity or
light, while the red triangle was a Masonic motif from the French Revolution
and its retrospective ideals: liberty,
equality, fraternity. In the invented history, the red represents blood of the
Mambí soldiers, and the blue, Cuba’s
sky. Regarding the solitary star, how
could one expect any mention of it as a
symbol of a country ready to join the
states represented by stars on the U.S.
flag? Disdain for reality has gone so far
as the recent myth that explains that each
point of the star symbolizes each of “The
Five” prisoners who were incarcerated in
the U.S. for espionage and have been
returned to the island. Repulsion is only
another form of attraction. The TV spot
known as the “Saturday Movie” came on
the scene during the very same “antiscum” decade of the 1980s. It decriminalized commercial, U.S. films. Cubans
reacted very enthusiastically. Even the
staunch anti-Yankee folks reaffirmed the
theory that the relationship between Cuba and the United States seemed like a
pathological scenario of gender violence
or Stockholm syndrome. Later came
“Colorama” and the fissure got wider
when monitoring began of offers for the
demonized musical market: Bee Gees,
Michael Jackson, Kook & the Gang,
Kim Carnes, and Blondie as a tempting
counterpart to the offerings we vengefully called “bolo,” that is, music from Socialist Europe: Ala Pugachova, Karel

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