Emigration: the road to freedom with no destination, shipwreck, despair and death: the price of escape.
The people of Israel, that is like saying God’s people, emigrated from Egypt. The Creator led them to “the promised land flowing with milk and honey” to deliver them from the slavery to which they was subjected for over two hundred years.
Migration is a human habit, always with the hope of a promised land. Erroneously in most cases when we emigrate we believe we are taking the the path of freedom because we freed ourselves from something that has been oppressing or subjugating.
Wars, famines causing disasters, pandemics, major droughts making vast areas of land inhospitable, and dictatorships, are causes for men, or people, to migrate.
But of all these the less justifiable and most aberrant, which denigrates the human condition, is the emigration caused by dictatorships, and the foolish, clumsy and ruthless rulers who lead them.
Fear either from instinct or reasoning is a characteristic of living things which in most cases protect themselves against physical and spiritual harm. Fear is the most powerful weapon of dictators, they sow it, cultivate it in the masses of people, inoculate it and sow, grow it in the masses of the people, inoculate it and vitiate, root it, make it part of the culture of everyday life, one learns to live with fear, fear is drunk, fear eats, sleeps with the fear because it comes into the room, it’s on the sheets, in bed, in the bathroom and in everything related to life itself.
“Paredón, Paredon, Paredón” — “to the wall!” “shoot him” — was an order, a bloodcurdling scream of the recently begun Revolution: Wall and Presidio, there are many anecdotes, much blood was shed behind the walls of la Cabaña under the direct orders of Che Guevara, Raúl and Fidel Castro, masters of life and death for the people of Cuba. In appearances justice was done, in reality man and justice was murdered, freedom was also a victim of the executioners and the Presidio.
The first stampede was from Camarioca. The better prepared, the smartest, the most progressive and also those who were most able to run the country’s economy, deprived of liberty and their property chose to escape. Rather an expulsion, the foolish dictatorships and their fanatical dictators expel citizens nonchalantly.
They left their homes and their property, many a childhood was immersed in the silence of spaces never to return, sadness and nostalgia rather than raising hand to heart in a goodbye desperately locked in a suitcase that cried when it was opened. It was the chosen the path of freedom in the ‘60s of most who did not accept the power of the communists. A small group took or continued with arms in hand, rose or remained as rebels in the Escambray Mountains. Later they launched a great number of people against them to until they slaughtered them rather than defeated them.
This forced migration has continued for 62 years, first from the monarchical government of Fidel Castro and now of his brother Raul. Regardless of race, sex, age or mental or social status, the Cuban deprived of human rights and freedom has been launched in suicidal and desperate exodus in the landing gear of a plane, in the tank of a ship, in a inflated tractor tire, in a rustic boat, the risk is not measured, not calculated, children who will never again see their parents because they perish in the mouth of a shark or are swallowed up by fate in a foreign land, mothers weep bitter tears every day wondering why no one answer, brothers, uncles, nephews, grandparents and friends waiting a day marked in their lives for many years of despair, a face known or unknown and, in some airport of Cuba, North America or anywhere else in the world, to give one hug more than all time kills us.
The American dream attracts migration from anywhere in the world, but the Cuban is not much interested in the dream of the north without waking up from this nightmare of Castro-Communism and for this reason the emigrants go to any country following the closest path and the colony of Cubans that existed there before 1959 has swelled more and more since 1959.
Sad this path of freedom.
23 January 2013
