As with God, different cultures represent it in distinct ways and with disparate names, but the meaning is the same: to celebrate every February 14 the “day of lovers, of love or of Saint Valentine.” It was in Roma — whose letters reverse to spell “Amor” — where the worship of Cupid began, he who is also called Valentine or Eros, depending on the culture. It’s a universal tradition on this day to give gifts, cards, flowers and marked expressions of affection to your partner, friend, or any person you feel affection for.
Love, as the old European song says, makes the world go ’round, it is the essential human value between the Creator, people and nature. It is the joining of feelings that arise that we imagine and create in lasting works in our environment, “tangible or not,” for everyone to enjoy and we continue doing so throughout our lives. It is the sacred duty not to harm people, to protect animals, to be better social beings, more ethical and of greater service to others.
In the Cuban archipelago, in recent years, we see the trend of increased informal marriages in our society. However, we are a people who have overcome many prejudices and conceded a moratorium on the classic wedding, but not on love. However, the lack of a their own living space for the married couple — the desired wedded home, as the refrain goes — has resulted in new amatory practice and lifestyles in the heterosexual couples in our population.
As long as the family is the DNA of society, when something changes or interrupts “the genetic code,” the entire structure is compromised. Modern men and women changed in a significant way the vow “until death (of love) do us part.”
In Cuba we do not celebrate Halloween, but that kid with wings, with his quiver full of deep and sincere emotions that he dedicated into shooting arrows to catch feelings, to him we open the doors of our affections and passions without any question. It is part of our growth and free will to love; is the endless cycle of human history that leads us to “mate like the birds and the bees” with our partner, to return the affection of our friends, or to consecrate ourselves in our family.
Happy day of love, of friendship, and, why not, of coexistence among all.
14 February 2013
