In the early morning, the news left me sleepless.
Fidel is dead.
Three words were enough to shake the world, three words filled the pages of newspapers around the world, three words were enough to unleash passions, joy or sadness. Three words marked the end of one life, which did not leave us indifferent.
We can differ –and differ is a right, and sometimes a duty– on the direction taken by the Cuban revolution, on the mistakes made in the pursuit of a dream, the realization of an ideal. We can try to hide behind the magic word “errors” (which diminishes the seriousness of the violations of human rights) the fields in which they locked up opponents to the regime, the poet silenced, the condemned to exile.
We can try to close our eyes to their progress in the medical field, in education, in their giving rights to those whose rights had been denied during Batista’s dictatorship.
We can say so many things, praise or condemn, repeat without thinking, we can speak of the hero or the tyrant, remember the one who offered us a dream or who gave us a nightmare, so many things we can think about if we decide to see the world in black or white turning the page of history before it absolves us.
And previously to the “errors”, there was the dream, the dream of a man and a people who dared to overthrow a tyrant and install democracy, who in a world in black and white separated by a rigid curtain tried to create the path to a Caribbean socialism, cheerful, carefree, less dogmatic, at least that is how we saw it back then, a man who stood up against the first world power, the one used to impose its designs by fire and sword, the one that invaded and changed Presidents and Governments armed with the universal and “democratic” power of weapons.
The man who became a myth in Cochinos Bay, who brought a gust of fresh air to the heart of New York when a young woman of incipient beard and shining ideals eyes stood up at the United Nations. The man who opened the doors to thinking just to shut them down once more by forcing to think either in black or white or gray.
We can say so many things, but one thing we cannot deny, the fact that one morning in the month of November of the year 2016, three words shook the world. Fidel is dead, and I try to find out at what moment they betrayed my dreams.
Translated by Priscilla Gac-Artigas
Fulbright Scholar/Professor of Latin American Literature@ Monmouth University, NJ
Correspondent Member of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE)