Return to the everyday

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

The days pass and everything will return to how it was. Yoani is still on crutches and Orlando refuses to see a doctor, yet the streets are again looking like the streets of my city. The Havana of secret fears, the poor whom nobody wants to see, repressing and corrupting police, feline Security, people without Faith, decadent art.

Once again, the minutes of freedom are counted in the hour and a half showing of Chaplin during the Polish cinema series. My friend comes to me again to ask for the updated version of Voces Cubanas. People talk about the economic situation and they argue, with a sidelong glance, about the failed policy of the government.

I take the bus and see the children of the Interior Ministry, I don’t think they’re even 18 yet, with the same apathetic faces as everyone else. I can’t help wondering to what extent they share the irrationality of the parents. I smile every time the protagonists of small scale social indiscipline (on the P4 bus we are the majority by far), give the driver our fares rather than throwing the money in the farebox, a slap in the face to all those televisions commercials that say we don’t have to give the poor driver anything: Everything is for Papa State, Lord Absolute.

I sit back again and look at the people around me. Tired and sweaty returning to their homes, some boys in front of me explain how to connect computers to the web, I remember it in case I need it some day: divide the cable, then join the first one with the sixth and the second with the fourth. I imagine them saving some citizens from undocumented kidnappers who say they are the supreme power. Something tells me that not too much is lacking for us to get to this point, where citizen solidarity will flourish on this little island.