Dilated Pupils / Reinaldo Escobar #Cuba

pupila-dilatadaWe’ve all had at some time the experience of checking the changes in our visual perception after our pupils dilate. In a dark room where we can’t even see our hands in front our face when we enter, bit by bit we come to distinguish the environment as our eyes become accustomed to the absence of light.

So we are in Cuba in relation to those little flashes of freedom that emerge from some of the measures taken by our leaders. The most recent has been allowing us to watch the Venezuelan channel TELESUR. My colleague Michel Suarez reflected on this in Diario de Cuba, when he spoke about the this new pinhole in the dark. In the comments on his article there was no lack of those who, after ingesting huge gulps of the Coca Cola of forgetting, seemed not to understand the happiness that one drop of water brings to the thirsty, the photo of a country landscape when locked in a cell, an Internet connection at a speed of 56 kw/s in a Havana hotel…

So much time in the darkness has sharpened our vision and it will be this acuity that will allow us to find a way out, and I am not speaking of escape but of a bloodless and civilized solution.

Our rulers, or those “satraps usurping power” as my friend Ramón González prefers to say, will be in Chile now showing themselves off as democrats; who knows if they will promote, there, the ratification of the U.N. Human Rights Covenants now being demanded with such vehemence by Cuban civil society; who knows if, in February, when Raúl Castro is inaugurated for his second term, he will announce the deepening of this “reforms” and now someone will be able to buy a new car at a dealership, and the self-employed will be able to import raw materials, and the land leases will be extended for the current beneficiaries, or any other apparently minor detail.

Here we are, not blindfolded, but with our pupils dilated, detecting the pinholes.

Reinaldo Escobar

25 January 2013