I’ve never liked goodbyes. Like just about everyone I suppose. But only because we give a normal act, part of what it is to live, an especially gloomy connotation. And good goodbyes are also a sign of good events.
This blog was born on July 9 two years ago, and was born for an incontestable reason: it was my blog or my emotional equilibrium. I had to write it. It was the act of rebellion and self-realization most genuine that I’ve undertaken up to today.
However, I defend tooth and nail the concept of evolution. I defend the idea that everything, absolutely everything that makes up our existence, has a beginning and an end. Even the things that are most valued, most needed, most beautiful.
We have friends who appeared at some time in our lives and played a decisive role. They became indispensable. And then they disappeared again. When we come together at some point, or they join us by change, we revive the affection, but especially all the memories: what we were is in the past. It hurts to admit it, but in the present we are almost strangers.
Well, today I also conclude this blog. I think I no longer need it. And in almost nothing in my life do I act out of habit. I never write, discuss, love, read, see, and play sports from habit.
When I lose the vital motivation that fires my creativity, the imagination, the reason, I divest myself of the cadaver. Without much effort. Like the Greek Diogenes got rid of his barrel and his bowl, the only possessions that accompanied him in his frugal existence.
The origin of this blog was never to write “for the cause of Cuba.” Not only because I have written posts that have nothing to do with that, but also because above the fate of my country is my own fate. Writing, for me, has always been a hundred times more vital than writing about or for Cuba. To write, I suspect, without any certainty, is my reason for being.
Today that obsessive motivation that, in Cuba, led me publish as many as four posts a week is gone. Perhaps because I have other ways of asserting my political, religious, sexual, artistic opinions, without suffering serious consequences for it. Perhaps because something inside me knows that it’s time to evolve.
And it’s time to write something else.
Of course written journalism has been and will continue to be one of my passions. My articles continue to circulate on the web occasionally, when the motivation inherent in good tests moves me to type two or three pages and send them off to navigate.
But this Little Brother, the most crucial, risky and successful decision I made in my life up until now, this decision that started from a dream of mine, out of sheer panic, in a country where to dare to write independently is an act of crazy people, now closes its cycle of almost two years with 115 posts, several thousand weekly hits, and a legion of virtual friends who will never have any idea how much their support as readers and commentators meant to me.
My blog gained me the respect of hundreds of people in my hometown. I will never forget those strangers who suddenly approached me in the street, whispering, and extracted from their backpack some folded sheets printed with my articles. They were passing them on to someone else.
My blog brought me some of the best professionals and friends I’ve had the happiness to know in the United States. My blog made me forget my name in many circles. The Ernesto who I’d been for 27 years, became, simply, The Little Brother, or The Litt.
Also continuing to diligently call me, have been the petty little agents who are paid a salary in my city to follow me, and who regularly commented on my writing, “Have you seen what our Little Brother has posted now?”
To all, virtual friends and plainclothes cops, readers, collaborators with dates or topics, those who made it a habit to click on my link twice a week, to all my eternal gratitude and the certainty that without your attentions this blog would have died at birth.
To the others, there will always be Paris. For me, to tell my children, I will always have this free, irreverent and ambitious space as proof of the greatest exercise of a vocation for writing, and the freedom that I had in my young adulthood.
April 29 2012
