Vigil of the Scales / Lilianne Ruíz

To be happy in Cuba is a life style. It means to renounce many things but nothing comparable to renouncing true solidarity.

It’s always possible to shut yourself in like a turtle or a snail or a selfish and irresponsible human being. You can be happy if you fall in love, if you have a nice little house, some money, a paradise lost in the weeds. Possessions that kill our hunger to be alive. I am not annoyed with the tranquility, I just know there is something more beyond love.

The world of the human soul is so great that you can be happy or unhappy, regardless of the limitations your freedom constantly suffers… if you can learn a style of permanent renunciation, perhaps of evasion, even of survival, and forget about others. If you stop being responsible for yourself, for the future of your children, for your friends, for the desperately poor and villainous that the dictatorship of the State engenders in man, you will be happy in Cuba. If you renounce your freedom out of fear. If you accept the threat and withdraw, take cover, you will come to swell the sea of the anonymous people. In how many ways do the man and the woman lose their innate desire to be free?

I will emerge from the uterus one more time… I will be born into real life.

May 29 2012