By Lien Estrada
HAVANA TIMES – A friend once told me that she was talking with a mutual friend in San Jose Park in Holguín. Both are Catholics, and when the parish priest passes by, they greet him. The priest is a foreigner and hadn’t been working in that parish for very long. They began talking about the challenges people had to face, and he replied that, for example, if what happens to them with transportation happened where he comes from, they would have set it on fire. The mutual friend told him: “No, you can’t do that here because of the type of system we live under.” My friend told me that the priest responded: “It’s not a question of system, it’s a question of mentality.”
I never forgot that conversation. And I keep the question very present: “Is what I’m living through because of the system or because of my mentality?” There’s no doubt the two feed into each other. The truth is that when stories reach me about how some groups rise up in defense of others, I tremble with good energy. But when the opposite happens, I frankly experience disappointment. The anguish that abandonment generates.
A case in point: yesterday one of the young men who is part of the audiovisual project “el 4tico” appeared before the courts. I got the news through social media, and I read that it would begin at 8:30 a.m.
I was one of those who decided to attend. I even imagined that we could be a large group, supporting the young men, of course. I’m sure that, as of today, more than half the country agrees with them. When I arrived, there were few people — in my opinion. It was held behind closed doors. If you looked through the glass doors, inside there were only the authorities, and seated: the accused young man, an older woman whom I presume is his mother, and a young woman beside him who I don’t know if she is his sister or his girlfriend.
I thought both detained young men would be there. I asked why there was only one. A young man who was outside with me replied that they were being held on different charges. That seemed strange to me, but that’s how things are in this country. Common sense fled us a long time ago, off somewhere. Here we live on alert mode. Always.
Damn — more political prisoners! It’s as if this country, which gradually decided not to produce anything and to make everything disappear, generates more detainees every day, so that they can at least say the “Justice” system is working. Though from our perspective, it shouldn’t exactly be called “Justice,” but rather the opposite — which can go by many names, such as abuse of power.
I arrived before eight in the morning, of course. Needless to say, there were police everywhere. But that’s already known without having to be there. Other patrol cars circling around, and I was thinking that we weren’t protesting outside because of questions of “system or mentality.”
In Cuba we shouldn’t be puffed up with pride over the political and social histories we’ve built in these times. I wonder how many more men and women are going to go missing before the machinery squeezes everything dry before there’s a radical change. These experiences never fail to unsettle the heart a bit.
I left before it ended. I kept walking toward the city center. I greeted some acquaintances, went into the cathedral, chatted a bit, and bought a calendar. Then I headed back home.
Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here.