Confused Phrase / Regina Coyula

“Revolution is to shape ethical principles.” I repeat from memory a phrase I heard today in the press. Attributed to Fidel Castro, I’m not too sure if it forms a part of a well-known fragment of one of his speeches (Revolution is…). A phrase in the midst of the corruption, laziness, the poor quality of education, the visible lack of an education that governs relationships among young people–and those not so young–the patterns of the political police harassing the dissidence.

An incomplete list but sufficient. The so-called Revolution not only doesn’t shape new ethical principles; it lambastes the existing ones for being “bourgeois.” The irony: the Revolution ended years ago, and ethical principles are degraded to the point where it will take several generations to restore them.

To say it in the official way: this is neither the time nor the place to wield a phrase so devoid of content.

26 March 2014