Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 27

Far from repudiating the revolutionary government’s earlier gaffe or demonstrating even the
slightest interest in true reform, the contemporary
migration policies - which are designed to return
Havana migrants back to their regions of origin
(forcefully and inhumanely) - confirm indolent illogical decision-making and reveal the project’s
failure. The current situation confirms the inescapable tight spot the government has put itself in
once
again,
thanks to its
senseless way
of doing things
and manipulation of the people: the very
orientales who
were once cannon fodder for
the revolutionary system are
today a living
denunciation,
endangering
the stability of its power. There is no doubt that
this is just one more instance of the many governmental plans that have backfired.
Paradoxically, the emigrants who are settled on
Havana’s periphery are almost unanimously either against or indifferent to the current policies.
Just as the poorest Cubans, they are fed up with
the rhetoric they’ve been hearing for over fifty
years - about a future woven in broad daylight,

only to be unraveled in the shadows, like Penelope’s shroud. It seems the government has had no
choice but to find sympathizers amongst the new
(bastard) middle class formed by the sediment of
money generated by military businessmen, foreign investment, and tourism, or from hypocritical, opportunistic intellectuals who love to pose
as the saviors of socialism. This is the only social
class that benefits from the dictatorship’s old
fashioned, conservative way
of the revolution, the leaders
of which proclaimed that it
was of the poor and for the
poor.
It is a shame that these issues
are not being studied by historians and social scientists the
way they should, and that it is
only possible to find any sort
discussion about them (al-

ways brief and rapidly penned) in the independent press or perhaps presentations
by a few scholars who work on their own
and at their own risk.
One consequence of this informational
void, particularly given the increased regionalist discrimination - especially
against the orientales - in present-day Havana today, is that most observers understand today’s social dynamics merely as
the result of historical backwardness, yet
another chapter in the age-old saga of our
dis-encounters on account of geographic
obsessions. I think this is too simplistic,

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