The Silent Re-Evolution / Angel Santiesteban

Photo: Reuters

MANY FRIENDS HAVE written me to ask why my posts are postponed when the always turbulent Cuban reality, unfortunately for us, requires direct and constant attention. My closest friends demand a commitment to my readers. Others, most of them strangers, have approached me in the street to tell me that they are aware of my blog and miss new writings.

On reading the emails or hearing the words I couldn’t help but feel a certain irresponsibility and, at the same time, an infinite pleasure, because to demand my opinion is a sign of recovery of the social health so lacking in our society, the need for information, and the search for it no matter what.

Something is changing in the minds of Cubans, perhaps because we have begun to lose our fear, others because the blinders have fallen from their eyes. They know they were misled. There is nothing left, now, of what was so much promised in exchange for the sacrifice of several generations. They have been cheated of their lives, and the only thing left is to search for the truth, then to tell it to those close to you, because they need it, and urge them to share it and to feel the relief provided by it. Knowing the truth is like a virus that, after an incubation period, runs through our bodies, and at the instant of filling them, is contagious.

I owe my readers an explanation: my work as a writer, these days, occupies all my time and I don’t believe I’m able to write all the literature that, emerging from within me, kick with anger because it is the moment of their birth. I finished two books of short stories, started a novel, halfway, and happened to have another almost finished. I am preparing an anthology of my stories to be published in Europe. A publisher asks me for a noir novel that a wrote for amusement some years ago and haven’t looked at again, and so I have taken it up again lately.

I have also been regularly summoned by and met with the police authorities of the country. Since I haven’t received any new denunciations after their accusing me of being a “rapist,” “assailant,” “thief,” “murder suspect,” “threatener of a stranger,” “running over a child with my car,” etc. without any victims nor witnesses coming forward; in short, the years the Prosecutor is asking for these supposed crimes, exceed fifty.

As I wrote in a previous post, after the presentation of a hidden camera video where a supposed “witness,” who never came to testify against me, confesses the pressure and offers made to him to agree to discredit me, that haven’t continued this line of government blackmail.

Now there’s a new variant. They’ve referred me the Havana Psychiatric Hospital (Mazorra),where they make me write, draw cartoons, answer questions from doctors who tell me secretly that they like my books. In a way, there’s nothing for it but to enjoy it, I know that in some way I have to collect this experience, and it is a post I have to write, because I looked for the pavilion where, last year, they killed the elderly left unprotected.

At this time I add my duties to a fraternal organization which I have belonged to for twenty-three years and which I love with a passion, where I hold positions of importance. Add to that, due to an accident, I lost the phalanx of a finger. But all is well now, the rest of the fingers type. Anyway, I have lost other spiritual pieces that were more important to me.

But nothing is overwhelming when I think that “something is changing,” I’m sure that’s the salvation of our country. This is a silent “re-evolution,” an insubordination in the minds of people that leads to postponed resolutions.

These days I write the posts I owe, it’s my duty, because “something is changing” in the Cuban population, and it’s for the better.

April 29 2011