LOOK AT ME DEATH, AND DO NOT CRY FOR YOUR LOVE
[Short video of the tanks on the train]
When Orlando Zapata Tamayo died in Havana, I went to the Playa del Este to die a little too me. En route 462 we saw a convoy of trucks loaded with tanks. Tanks of war to the capital, against the capital city, many, many, with the hatches open without any protection or canvas from the cameras of Google Earth. Ostentatiously desperate tanks to go into battle against the only enemy of the Cuban Revolution: the flesh of the Cubans …
This fucking night Wilman Villar Mendoza died in Santiago de Cuba. I went back home, sad and not wanting to pose as if I wouldn’t lie down to sleep (mediocre death of my mornings), when at the intersection of Fábrica and Vía Blanca, at the Paso Superior, I saw again, as into a nightmare of Rodolfo Walsh: tanks of war in all their glory, terrible, endless, rolling now on a rickety train that departed from Havana, who knows if toward this other Havana accused of being “heroic yesterday and hospitable always” …
These armor-plated and I have a hidden appointment in some revolutionary square of this country. I will give gladioli in their scavenger swan beaks. I’ll make graffiti from semen in their heartless liners. I will finally crush their leather skulls before the international press that will not dare to say so much as a peep later (that is, not to tweet …).
These soldiers of green death and I have an appointment of weak light in any one of these catacombs we dug collectively just as the Special Period in Times of Peace was announced …
There is no dialogue more beautiful than the metal lattice of the free electrons (bullets, missiles). Even the smell of rust seduces mammals: it reminds us that the fetus floats in blood. Memory molecules. Do not make patriotic poets with me, fuckers. I am a biochemist. I know whereof I speak. The vital spark, the quantum breath of energy, a pixel of freedom. What we never glimpsed before. A biography of truth. The nostrils excited as the soul of a shark about to chomp his victim. How to transcribe now this lunatic laughter at the height of his euphoric rage. Aargh …
Men and women everywhere have loved you. I was free and I apologize for this insult to your dignity. Now look elsewhere. No more words. An act, a gesture, at least a shrug …
I already hear the stampedes from my keyboard. And there are no buildings that fall under the criminal exhaustion of the morning. It’s the future, the future that is announced as a culmination of exquisite corpses at close range. We die, we die without pain, compatriots, because from the wicked initial anthem the homeland contemplated us with hatred, remember? …
January 20 2012
