The Sound of Words / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

The old Smith-Corona typewriter fights against the rust that ideologicaloxidation imposes on it. It is not only agile or subversive fingers and minds, but the truth, that suddenly breaks through the thicket of pronouns, nouns, prepositions and verbs that are the subject and predicate of the freedom of thought. That’s why the mechanical keyboard beats with the percussion of the letters and dances with the music of the words, whose melody is more harmonious when it overflows the lines of the rigid politicalstaff and does not fear denouncing the horrors of the jails, telling the stories of those who resist waiving their rights and relating it from thecountless Cubans who have written their names in the sea.

The subordinate clauses are insubordinate in the fairness and right of those who do not accept being merchants of adulation nor slaves of set phrases that sound dissonant when reduced to orders. Decades ago inCubawords were melted with lead and walls, and the authorities proscribe other methods ofself expression that do not favor the only existing party. The fear, the executions and the denunciations through more than five decades created a folklore of anti-democratic and paralyzing division that took out of from the closet and internationalized our longings and rights to listen to pluralistic music in this little country of castaways who, more than emigrants, encourages fugitives from totalitarianism.

Translated by mlk

May 22 2012