Pray to God But Don’t Stop Rowing / Rebeca Monzo

Rebeca Monzo, 7 July 2015 — The conversations and approaches plagued by enormous pauses with “our neighbor across the street” continue. As far as all Cubans, or rather the people, know this started on a very significant date on our religious calendar, December 17 of last year, Saint Lazarus Day, but I believe, and I don’t think I’m mistaken, in reality it began long before.

The Cuban government has not been at all moderate in its internal language for us and its acolytes, nor in the exaggerated requests for compensation from the United States government, in exchange for practically nothing in return. And who, if not the island’s government itself, is going to compensate the people of Cuba for those 56 years of expropriations, interventions, occupations of buildings, the deterioration of the country and family separations, without even counting the number of dead lying in the depths of the Florida Straits for trying to escape the island in precarious craft, during almost five decades of a prohibition on emigration by safe means?

While the government decided to turn the page on certain questions, and leave off using some of the aggressive language against the United States in the media, slowness will continue to mark the official path, without considering that the truth is huge and in a hurry, it is the Cuban people who have endured hardships, scarcities of every kind and beatings, like those that continue to fall on the peaceful Cuban opposition, the most recent example of these practices being last Sunday when Antonio Rodiles headed alone and quietly to Santa Rita Church in Miramar to join with the Ladies in White and to offer them his moral support.