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Raul Rivero. Posted on Fri, Aug. 23, 2002 in
The Miami Herald.
HAVANA -- Yes, Cubans sign tickets to hell by approving government-sponsored
referenda, march in parades and applaud out of fear. But their illusions are
sustained by different sentiments of higher quality.
For the government, those dreams are the most dangerous rebel territory in
the republic because neither the police nor the psychiatrists can know their
course and depth.
The devices of harassment cannot reach them. Decrees, orders and summonses
melt away in the brightness where people are secretly free. Neither projectiles
nor propaganda reach those heights. The tall tales told by the spokesmen of the
national Eden -- sitting in armchairs made of birch from Stalin's forests -- are
unheard.
Here, daydreaming is a necessity, a force of Nature, a resource that has
material shape -- like bread and water -- because reality is a fixed and sticky
photograph carrying the curse of sundowns that have no tomorrow.
It is under cover of those blankets -- where Cubans are grandiose and
sovereign because they create an intimate, unreal, electric architecture --
where they live the way they truly would like to live.
All this is an excuse to talk about family, because those fictions have no
base on which to build palaces and corporations. They are not trips to the
French Riviera or Benidorm. People don't aspire to own a Rolls-Royce or a
private jet.
We're talking about more-modest pipedreams; even poor, very poor, fantasies.
A friend of mine, an engineer about to reach 60, has three sons. He lives in
central Cuba and works on a government farm. He signed the resolution for
changes in the Constitution and waved a little flag at the demonstrations.
Its just that, around this time, his younger son, the only one still living
at home, leaves to live abroad. In the young mans luggage, the engineer places a
book of letters by José Martí and writes some notes on the pages
that are to be opened only at night in Tenerife.
As they part, this man tells his son that his great dream is that none of
the three boys would have had to go away. In that dream, hed enlarge the house,
they all would live together, and the boys could do whatever they wished and set
their own schedules. But every Friday, just Friday evenings, they'd all sit down
at table to eat and talk a while.
It's a de-politicized illusion. All the man wants is to be near his children
and that his grandchildren learn to speak Spanish without the accent of the
Iberian Peninsula.
Not much to ask.
The engineer knows that some wishes never come true and are just there to
while away the time.
Still, he asks his son: "Help me dream about that house. You think
about it, too. Maybe someday well get it. And if we ever get it, don't come late
on Fridays.''
Good dreams never end.
Raúl Rivero is an independent journalist in Cuba | 
