Imagine Your Worst Nightmare / Lia Villares

The Cuban activist Lia Villares. (CLAUDIO FUENTES)

diariodecubalogoDiario de Cuba, Lia Villares, Havana, 6 February 2018 — Imagine your worst nightmare. Imagine that it materializes in real time, what you have intuited so many times, but it is no longer a lucid dream, now it is pure and harsh reality.

Cold and concrete.

The most despicable being, the one you have dedicated yourself to denouncing because he answers to a repressive apparatus in charge of crushing you for telling the truth and persecuting you for defending freedom, imagine him multiplied by an army of Agents Smith, an army of rats ready to sneak in your house and rummage through your things with the zeal of a rodent.

It is the nauseating scene of your life: your privacy, your memories, all your memories preserved over the years in small digital media, discs, all of your life in the hands of minions trained to destroy all your work, your work for years, your personal files and finally to confiscate everything in nylon bags where the words “Criminal Evidence” are read because it is precisely the treatment used, under the weak argument that “you are engaged in a subversive or counterrevolutionary activity.”

If you have read the novels The Master and Margarita or Doctor Zhivago you can have a clearer idea of ​​what it is like to see your most intimate spaces invaded by a large group of harassing people eager to insert themselves into the depths of your private life.

It is a right too individualistic that communism grants only to the royal family: only they can protect themselves from the eyes of others.

In your complete defenselessness you are exposed even though you have always tried so hard to avoid having secrets, given the circumstances: you have been even more daring in showing yourself an exhibitionist, tremendously narcissistic in a failed act of irreverent protest.

No matter how much effort you put in trying to convince them that you have nothing to hide, that in fact you yourself publish everything, that you have followed the collectivist rhythm of not considering your privacy as a treasure so valuable, because you have to share even your most intimate wishes and your most precious dreams.

Your will is reflected in your actions.

Your movements are quite careless because it has never made much sense nor has it been your true intention, conspiring for “the cause” because you think it must be the same for the few conscious, lucid, clear thinking friends that you have left.

You have left all the groups because you do not find coherence, humility, transparency or simply the real friendship that you have been looking for everywhere.

You have seen so much

You have traveled a lot to reach the same point, again and again.

You have experienced the hatred and humiliation of that sick government, parasitic and blinded by power.

On your journey, your confidence and much of your faith in people went away, contaminated with selfishness and competition in the ridiculous march of a vicious circle.

Your dignity and your hope peer timidly from your gaze, not so innocent, not as clean as before.

In front of you the road no longer splits: there is a single straight line indicating the exit, you can see it clearly but your feet feel heavy and your senses do not respond.

On the table where you previously spent your hours on the laptop that you came to consider an extension of your mind, is the page that you patiently fill by hand trying to breathe and preserve some kind of calm.

In some dark office of Villa Marista are all your projects, await (at worst) a quick reformat, an annihilation, a thorough elimination that can only give you pain.

But you are just another victim, nothing distinguishes you from the previous ones, perhaps even more humiliated before a more painful outrage.

Now you just have to get up again and grab that path without looking back.