Anyone who has to confess some collaboration is better off doing it now, no matter how small it is, keeping it in only causes pain on both sides.
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 27 July 2024 — It is not about revenge but about sincerity. I see them leaving every day, packing their bags, renouncing their ideology in silence and leaving behind the victims of their extremism, those punished by their ideological supremacy and those killed by their silence. No, it is not revenge, it is justice that they at least say something once they get out of the vicious circle in which they chose to be victimizers. Anyone who has to confess some collaboration is better off doing it now, no matter how small it is, keeping it to themselves only causes pain on both sides.
I have no list of names with whom to settle accounts. The accounts have already been settled by life: we have seen so many die crossing the sea, thousands have fallen due to lack of effective medical care, leaving to say goodbye are many more as a result of the malnutrition that has taken over the homes of this Island and we are hanging by a thread, due to the unhealthiness that hits us from all sides. At this point there are no longer winners or losers, only shadows that wander around.
They have left us their dead and their ghosts, their empty houses, their political shells, their lies that cannot be sustained because there is no one left… or almost no one.
They should, for once, be honest. They should say that they were wrong, that they supported a system that plunged us into national, human and family ruin. They leave and, in addition, they leave us with their indifference. They leave and change their names, they rewrite their past, they pretend to be tolerant where before there was only extremism. They put on makeup, they have cosmetic-mental surgery, they no longer say “compañero” but “mister” but they have not made the necessary revision that all human improvement, all steps forward, implies.
They have left us their dead and their ghosts, their empty houses, their political shells, their lies that cannot be sustained because there is no one left… or almost no one. They leave and continue attending the meetings held by Cuban embassies around the world to gather solidarity with Castroism, applauding the regime, accepting the repression and tightening the shackles they put on us, who are still here, every day on the Island. They leave and continue to be our executioners. One can cut a throat in many ways: by brandishing the axe or by remaining silent when another brandishes it.
Where are their cries, their demands, their thoughts about the drama they left behind beyond sending remittances to their families or trying to get them off the island?
If we have lost 10% of the residents of this Island between 2020 and 2023, it cannot be that this number of people was “clean” of having committed an act of repudiation, of having chivateado — snitched — on another through the perfidious mechanisms of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. It cannot be that this is the 10% most innocent of the barbarities that have been committed on this Island in this more than half a century. So, where are all these people? Where are their cries, their demands, their thoughts about the drama they left behind beyond sending remittances to their families or trying to get them off the Island? Where is their civility?
Is it perhaps that what remains is oblivion? Indifference? Every man for himself? I am here and I already see the worst scenarios. I am living them. Without the involvement, which entails an obligatory self-criticism, of those who were part of this machinery that suffocates us, I cannot imagine how we are going to get out of this. If we get out at all.
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