THE DEATH OF THE PORTERS
No one in Cuba thinks about them, of course: they are the first killed anonymously, the porters, the gatekeepers, the doormen in every patriotic adventure of our most newsworthy pistol packers.
It is the doorman of the Moncada Barracks (he’s just one example) in a drunk post of the early morning carnival of Santiago de Cuba, a Sunday in July 1953, when the people of Cuban dressed up as soldiers of the dictator to also enjoy a license to kill.
And it is, in the same indecent decade, the spring doorman of the Presidential of Palace in Havana (it’s just another example), with his belly opened and his guts hanging out from the treacherous fire of the students jumping out of a Trojan florist’s delivery van (funeral omen).
There are more, of course, many dead deserved more: those are the expendable people of our History, those marked for death and not a peep out of them (and without some erudite scholar who dares to speak for them either).
Even less is the fate of the ancient mothers incumbent on us, left childless and without any right of redress (victims muted by the horror), nor do we know anything of their partners widowed early by the adventures of the gloomy gunmen (guys without aim, it seems, because they never killed who they bragged they killed), not even worth thinking about their offspring orphaned in the name of the proletariat of this country, always so ready when it’s time to destroy (but incapable of producing, for example, a single happy family).
Today, January 28, suicide Saturday when one feels like occupying the public plaza or climbing on a martyr’s statue in Central Park and shouting “How sad it all is,” while we make peepee out of pure panic, I remember this promiscuous plague of porters, those human beings or human zeros who paid the price of our present with their half-illiterate cadavers midway through life.
Nobody ever asked them anything. Bang bang period. An infertile grave without dates (-). Blur and the New Man. They were the dead weight of the entire raging country. Debased.
It’s so difficult then to remain standing this tedious afternoon in the door of my house.
January 28 2012
