Generation Y

For several years I’ve been noticing that we’ve stopped using such conciliatory words “excuse me”, “pardon me” and “I’m sorry”. When we screw something up, we would rather blame clumsiness than admit our failure. Into that absurd “code of national male-chauvinism”, with laughable phrases as “a real man doesn’t drink soup, a real man doesn’t eat sweets, etc., etc.”, someone has added the phrase: “A real Cuban doesn’t have to apologize.”

I remember the hilarious anecdote of a friend of mine, whose toe was “crushed” by the narrow heel of a lady passing by. When he realized the lady was not going to apologize, he got closer to her and said, “Forgive me, my lady, for getting your heel dirty.” The woman didn’t like the irony at all, and she came very close to again crushing the toe of her “victim.” All this because she didn’t want to pronounce the magic words that proved her regret for the mistake she made.

How many times have we been badly waited on, insulted or ignored by a waiter who is incapable of articulate words as, “I’m very sorry, Sir.” A phrase like that is not the key to the problem, but at least it leaves you with the sensation that there no premeditation went in such a bad service. The record of pending apologies, however, goes to the bureaucrats and politicians. They’ve been our teachers in this “intensive course for not regretting anything.”

We are exceptional students of a government who, in the almost fifty years of “dancing alone” in the stage of our politics, has never given an apology for anything. We’ve been waiting in vain for the necessary mea culpa for the revolutionary crackdown in 1968, for the atrocity of the repudiation meetings, for the dependence on the Soviet Union, and for the successive and disastrous economic plans that ended up in this productive asphyxiation. Anyway, the list is so long and so dramatic that, instead of an apology, it demands a prolonged act of “public flagellation.”

Oh, well. I already know politicians never apologize. That’s why we, small copies of them, who imitate them, repeating their slogans and poses, also emulate them in not apologizing. “For what?”, the lady who stepped on my friend’s foot would ask. “We already have our toe crushed, and up there they don’t want to recognize they already have their soles dirty.”

There are certain elders to whom the carefree attitude of the youngest produce burning and regret. They are those who intuit that those that come behind will wash away with all of that which for them resulted “holly”. They are right. Nothing more fearsome that a teenager that
doesn’t save his hours and threat to “change everything”. It is those seniors who, in the first opportunity, bring out to their grandchildren the diapers washed, the education offered, the
breakfasts served and even the medicines bought.

A wave of that rancor came in the dismissive term “jovenzuelo” (youngster) launched by Fidel Castro in his previous-to-latest reflections. The broadside of “dirty clothes” was motivated because a Cuban (maybe Yuniesky, Yohandry or Yasiel) was interviewed by a foreign news agency and declared that he didn’t want to talk about socialism. With a determinism typical of the young, he earned a virulent reaction from the Head of State himself, who dedicated a
paragraph to him.

The whole story of the fed-up youngster and the severe “grandpa” recriminating him, transported me to the years of the Glasnost, and to the magazine “Novelties from Moscow”, where a young man warned the sixty-somethings that were stopping the changes “You have all the power. We have all the time”. Of course, we have to color that phrase with the knowledge that even for Yuniesky or Yohandry the years pass, and they have every day less time.

I have the hunch that I’ll be a rather punk old lady. I’ll allow the kids of the 2050 to make fun of my pictures and of the ugly hairdo that I’ll have for more than three decades. I’ll let them tear down one by one everything that now result “untouchable”. I’ll do it gladly and with conformity, because I know that they not only have the time, but that -without their knowledge- inherit also the power. A huge power that allows them to choose between “waiting or doing something”.

The elections of February 24th are approaching and in the streets of my city few people ask who will be our next president. However, I have decided to make a -useless- exercise of pointing how I would desire was the next person that’s going to represent us:

-I don’t want a military to lead the country (you know I’m allergic to olive green). I prefer civilians that don’t speak of cannons, but that know of my angst and my daily difficulties.

-I dont’ desire another “charismatic” leader (that’s only good for nice pictures or to become an idol); but a modest administrator that would take care of the resources of the country and who doesn’t believe he “leads” us but that he must “serve” us.

-I’d like someone who, at the end of his period would yield the seat to the next one that would be elected; or that we can remove him ourselves in case he stops representing us.

-I dream with (and here I show my feminism) with a pragmatic housewife who, from up there will be worried about bringing us to our senses and dedicated to reconcile her children.

-I hope not ot have with another competent speaker, but with a rare specimen of politician that knows how to listen to us.

-I am not expecting a father -omnipresent and omnipotent- but a President, from whom I can complain -freely- in public.

I’m pretty absent-minded. The same I can leave the keys inside the house and close the door, than leave the wallet in the refrigerator. So I am forced to use a bunch of tricks not to forget anything. I have an agenda where I write what I need to do and write in pieces of paper -all over the house- the endless array of trivial tasks -which wouldn’t admit forgetfulness-. Even so, something always escapes me y generates me a “small catastrophe”.

Before the evidence of my neural limitations, I have had to develop certain mnemonic resources, in order not to lose my mind with the monetary duality that exists in Cuba. The daily choice about which currency to use to pay for services and products that we need, tests
my premature Alzheimer. So I carry in my left pocket the currency called “national”, which rather looks like money from a Monopoly game, without any real value; while at the reach of my right hand I keep -in case I have them- the convertible pesos.

If I must pay for a bus, buy a newspaper o get into a museum, I know that the sinister side of my pants which house the useless papers with which they pay our salary. Now, if I need to buy soap, cooking oil or toothpaste, is the turn to put my right hand in the other pocket. Normally, I walk the city and barely I find something that makes me take out one of the bills with the faces of the Apostle or the effigies of the Bronze Titan. Each day my left pocket becomes even more useless, while the “convertible currency” becomes obligatory to survive.

With this monetary schizophrenia we have lived since fifteen years ago. The confusion about which money to use is not the saddest part, but how to get the convertibles pesos to put them in the right pocket. These bills without face (look carefully and you will note that they only bring monuments o statues, never the direct look of some hero) are our collective obsession. To have them, we must do just the opposite of what would take us to the national currency. We have to break the rules, deflect resources to the black market, corrupt them, perform illegal works or -in the most innocent case- receive them from some friend or relative abroad.

It seems far away the day in which we can put the hand in the same pocket, extract the face of Marti, Gomez or Maceo and buy with “national currency”

What pushed me to this adventure of witting a Blog was the dissapointment left by the end of the controversy of the intellectuals in January 2007. An afternoon, like today, January 30th, we waited -a group of young people- to be able to enter the conference “The gray five years, reviewing the term”. The meeting in the House of the Americas pretended to canalize e institutionalize a debate that already had a couple of weeks elevating the temperature of the Cuban emails. A select list of guests began entering the room “Che Guevara”, while our “group of impertinents” saw -from outside- the midnight arrive.

We were there -markedly protesters- impeded by the custodians and the bureocrats of entering to opine and count about our encounters with censorship and dogmatism. We put rhyme to the cadence that appealed main organizer of the event: “Desiderio, Desiderio, hear my criterion” , but that didn’t work either. Inside, the voice of the Ministry of Culture repeated the idea that in a place under siege, to dissent is to treason; while in the same corner of G and Malecon the frustration of those not listened to, derived into tiredness and a
massive return home.

A year later, I don’t know what was left to us by those “Words of the Intellectuals” exchanged by email. What was left from that package of complaints and demands that started as criticism to the cultural policy of the revolution and derived in questioning of EVERYTHING. I intuit that the debate was hijacked by the institutions, jailed by the academic world full of concepts and fancy words, and condemned to take the curse of the imminent congress of the UNEAC.

However, it left us -at least to those who were outside- the conviction that we can’t wait to be left inside to the next debate. To me, personally, it added a definitive drop to start with this exorcism called “Generation Y”. It gave me the spatula for the long contained vomit that (sorry for the nasty metaphor) has fallen precipitously over this Blog.

Today I got up with a sore throat. The guilty party was the impertinent cold wind in the Malecón, to which I exposed myself last night while talking with a friend. During an hour we talked –thinking that we were fixing the world and the Island- without realizing that the temperature was falling. That’s why this morning I woke up with a cold and my whole body was asking for a hot lemon tea.

With that imperative I went to the closest agricultural market and asked for the green citrus of my cravings. One of the vendors told me: “Lemons are lost. You better buy a guava”. I didn’t let him convince me and continued with my whim of a warm lemon with a hint of black tea. I walked then towards Old Havana and in passing through several markets I realized that they didn’t have what I was looking for either. My throat was hurting even more and at that point I had to rethink if would be better to take a C Vitamin pill; but since my stubbornness is genetic, I insisted in searching for the missing fruit.

Close to two in the afternoon I gave up. I could barely swallow because of the burning in the throat, nothing compared with the disgust that provoked in my the “disappearance” of the lemons. The useless “search and capture” has generated in me an ill feeling more long lasting than the cold. I has left me with some hard questions: How is it that with so much fertile land and so many people with desire of producing, commercialize and sell, they don’t combine themselves and materialize an abundant offering of lemons in the market? Why is still Marabú the “king of the Cuban countryside” (go in a road trip by the highway to Pinar del Rio and you’ll see), while oranges, tangerines and -not to mention- grapefruits, go to the inventory of the exotic? When will the land belong to those who will make it produce and not of a State that sub-utilzes it in its abandoned parcels? Do I keep the hope or forget about the flavor of
lemons?

Since a couple of days ago, there’s a new parliament. Note that I don’t say “we have”, but that the form I use is impersonal, remote and alien. These 614 deputies that have ensured their post in the National Assembly meanwhile have -during the next five years- the boring task of assenting, unanimously, to each law proposal. The exercise of raising the hand, signaling conformity, will take a good chunk of the time in the sessions. Meanwhile, the choke hold imposed by the “Constitutional Modification” from 2002, will remind them that “socialism is irrevocable”.

To see them so disciplined, so correct, and strangely quiet in their chairs, leaves me with the rare impression of a “parliament” which doesn’t “parley”. Rather it seems like a group of spectators, incredibly uniform. I don’t remember a single discussion, a single argument born from the monotonous reunions in the Convention Palace. Nobody with the veins swollen, no one MP saying “No, I can’t accept it”. Neither has occurred the postponement of a session, due to the impossibility to get to an agreement. It results suspicious, that in a country where it is difficult to dialog and come to an agreement, there could be more than 500 people in consensus.

You already know that I am obsessed with words and their meanings (manias of philologist), so I propose not to continue calling this a “parliament”. Let’s call it what it really is: an inflated group of “listeners”, a select, respectful and obedient “auditorium”.

I remember when, in 1994 were allowed licenses to open a private restaurant (”palate”) or a cafeteria. Havana became filled with improvised kiosks that returned us to lost flavors and desired recipes. A couple of months later all the creativity showed in hundreds of umbrellas, tables in the porches and even sophisticated places to try a mamey shake or a guava pie. The energies contained by thousands of Cubans materialized in products and services of a quality and efficiency previously unknown by my generation.

We witnessed -between astonished and happy- the rebirth of a small private enterprise that our parents had seen drowned in the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968. A stroll by the streets of my native Central Havana, was the confirmation that the previous scarcity hadn’t been born of an innate incapacity to produce, but it was caused by the ironclad State controls to private ingenuity.

>From such boom in creativity and ingenuity we also had to part company, the moment that “up there” they understood that economic freedom would imply -inevitably- political autonomy. When Cuco, the owner of the most famous “palate” in my neighborhood, wanted to invest his profits in a trip to Paris, a modern car and in creating a “gastronomic” profile magazine, he started making the public officers worried. In order to counter those “poses of middle class” they rained him with high taxes, ill-intended controls and engrossed prohibitions. He had to close the restaurant and the flavor carnival that we had rediscovered, withdrew again to the shadows.

The “small private businesses” that survived the return to centralism, reveal to us that all of those energies to produce are just waiting, crouching, for the restrictions to loosen -even one millimeter- to conquer again our streets and porches. Cuco caresses his recipe book -enhanced in these years of waiting- and projects a new restaurant in the rooftop of his house. He has already designed the Web page to promote his dishes, the presentation cards and the color of the napkins. He is waiting -in the starting line- for the race call that would allow him to compete for his dream.

During three days the newspaper Granma -in its two central pages- inundated us with all the anniversaries that in this 2008 have a closed number. Together with the 155 years of the birth of José Martí, we could read about the 125 anniversary of the death Karl Marx and the half-century of the kidnapping of Fangio by the July 26th Movement. The act of reuniting that data y present it as a compendium for successive commemorations and memorials, has made me reflect on the relationship between Cubans and the past; the excessive weight of
yesterday in our lives.

All of those references to that which was and we must evoke, contrast with the little time we dedicate to talk about the future. The big anniversaries remind us that today -about several years ago- something happened or someone died. Most of these acts happened forty, fifty or
a hundred years back, while a void of events covers our closer periods. Those of us less than forty years old have not participated in almost anything, but have been just spectators of the glories of the past. Passive consumers of the fattened repertoire of dates past.

I fear that this tendency to historical “archeology” is filling up the time that we have to debate about today. I want to shake off so much anniversary and so many golden dates. I propose that the present be no more the scenario to recap about what happened and that it becomes -as it should be- the springboard to launch us to “tomorrow”.

Place of obligatory confluence, besides the main door of the Dihigo building, rests the reddish mastodon known as the “bench at the Literary School”. Over it have rested in the last decades the most illustrious behinds of our intellectual class. Many of those knowledgeable derrières rest today in a couch in Paris or a chair in Buenos Aires or crush the lawn of a German field. Regardless of the long pilgrimage of a good portion of its “tenants”, the long seat remains -with its durable caoba- in the same place.

Over the hard strips from which it is made, I sat the first day I arrived at the Faculty of Arts and Literature of the University of Havana and I crashed in it a couple of times, when I got a low grade. It knew of my difficulties with Latin and my predilection for Latin American literature. Its iron structure verified the few kilograms that the years of the Special Period gave to many of us students. It knew, also, if the incomprehensions that generated the sectarianism, the ideological “purges” and the dogmas.

Into the wood of this austere bench, is the memory of many award-winning writers, of others in disgrace and of those already passed away, while in its back, the sweat of several generations of critics, poets and historians, has left a “tint” of erudition.

Since I graduated I have not dared seat -again- in the “bench at the Literary School”. It is now the territory of the young ones that dream with literature, initiate themselves in poetry, and discover the way towards the metaphor. It remains as tough and proud as before, since its structure seems to feed of syntactic concepts, etymological analysis and dissonant rhymes.