Historical Absurdities

Foto: Claudio Fuentes Madan

How much do you make? That was the question a faceless journalist asked a man on the National Television News (the best science fiction saga on Cuban television, after, of course, the reading of Fidel’s Reflections). As he earned about three hundred pesos a month, she was wanted to know how much of that salary was spent on food for his family: Almost all -- then he hesitated -- All.

I looked at the screen with suspicion. What are they up to? Because obviously they are not going to raise the salaries, and even if they did it wouldn’t be enough to eat. Sometimes I wonder how the government can be so completely shameless with the salaries it pays. Suddenly the camera pans to show an organopónico, an urban garden site. I bust out laughing and my family looks at me strangely. What can I do? I justify myself. I could cry but I’ve seen the same movie too many times and have developed a certain cynicism. So instead of earning more money, what we have to do is plant a few furrows on the apartment balcony and grow some onions, right? My father used to grow herbs in the nineties until he realized he didn’t have any food to season.

I was sixteen when I first read, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera and I have never forgotten its analysis of the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche and human historicity. What happens to us when events are repeated over and over again? We could be more serious about overcoming them if they were unique and not the same ones, always repeated. Then when on TV some poor guy doesn’t earn enough money to feed himself and they show him  in front of a plot of dirt, instead of crying it makes me laugh, and he, instead of slapping his boss starts to garden, though he knows that his crop will never be enough. And if you live in Vedado and don’t have any dirt it doesn’t matter, the imperative is to eat, but the system is stuck in neutral and perpetuates itself.

I seem to have the syndrome of eternal return: nothing moves, nothing really changes. I would like to make a video in which I take each phrase said over the last fifty years that proves my theory, every “but now...” “perfecting...” “redevelopment...” “updating the model...” “correcting the mistakes...” Maybe on seeing it all together we would remember that there is another way to live, one in which we move forward over time, and not just go around in circles.