Welcome to savage capitalism
HAVANA – He came down from the Sierra Maestra with his troop of rebel soldiers, looking sharp in his olive-green uniform, with his long beard and Santa Juana seed necklace. He and the other bearded men, his barbudos, quickly made camouflage and epaulets chic, transforming fashion from the Paris catwalks to the New York subway.
But shortly after Fidel Castro entered Havana on Jan. 8, 1959, the revolutionary government began enforcing aesthetic prohibitions. Despite the rebels’ insouciant air, a witch hunt began against young people who themselves wanted to wear long hair, scraggly beards and the same guerrilla outfits that had captivated the nation – a nation that, from then on, was not supposed to look as subversive as its leader.
“Why does Fidel wear whatever he wants but we have to cut our hair to go to school?” I asked my mother.
We Cubans will have to fend for ourselves, and think for ourselves
“Because there is only one star in this show; the rest of us are supporting actors,” replied my mother.
The soundtrack of my life was a speech by Fidel. I heard his hoarse voice, his repetitive turns of phrase, even in dreams. When I was a little girl, I would stand in my school uniform for hours on end next to my mother in the Plaza de la Revolución, sweating and sunburned, hungry and thirsty, as he fired off endless litanies of numbers and percentages. Did Fidel, I wondered, never need a drink of water? Did he never need the bathroom?
When Fidel appeared on television in his pristine olive-green uniform, surrounded by presidents of other countries in suits and ties, I’d ask my mother: “Why is our president always dressed up like a soldier? Are we at war?”
My mother tried to explain that this was how Fidel went through life, that he was an eternal warrior and that his battle was not over yet.
When I was 12 I learned that presidents entered and left office through elections; until then I had presumed that presidents stayed in power until they died. “Mommy, is Fidel the king of Cuba? Is that why we don’t have elections?”
Every step my country took was dictated and defined by him. Everything I have become was decided by him or the institutions he created: what I could eat, what I could wear, what I could study.
When I began to travel abroad, I had to confront cash machines and the open microphones of uncensored journalists, and I understood then that I had spent my entire life in captivity. I did not know how to behave like someone from the Western world even though, geographically, that’s where I was born.
What will become of us now that Fidel is gone? Cubans of my generation have been educated under a paternalistic system that is nothing like the jungle to which we have now escaped. We are totally unprepared. GUILLERMO ENRIQUE CADIZ, 82, who fought with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra, watches as Castro’s ashes pass him during a three-day journey to the eastern city of Santiago last week in Jovellanos, Cuba. The Russian fantasy lasted too long. I am a person untrained for the speed of the real world.
Is that why I still live on this island when so many others have left?
When I learned of the comandante’s death, I realized that from now on we would have to fend for ourselves. We would have to learn to move through life as citizens of the world, not as the sheltered apprentices of a delirious master.
What will become of us without the zoo where they feed you, cure you, train you, polish you and gag you – and then realize that they don’t know what to do with you, with everything you know, are and want to be? What will become of the Cuban people without an obsessive, overprotective “father” who won’t allow them to sneak out into “savage capitalism”? What will become of us without that person who thinks for us, who gives us permission to enter and exit an island surrounded by politics and water? Who will give me – or deny me – permission to be the person I am?
On Nov. 26, the morning after Fidel died, I felt this little cage open, just a crack. I looked at the empty, silent city. But I didn’t go out to breathe in the cool air. Instead, I moved away from the door. I was afraid that someone might come in and hurt me. I was scared. And I understood that the cage was inside of me.
I thought about my parents, now dead. This came too late for them. And I thought about myself, a censored author in Cuba, a 21st-century woman whose voice has long been silenced. Despite the fact that this was the chronicle of a death foretold, I realized that Fidel was not as immortal as he thought he was. His long speech had ended.
But his ideas had long since contaminated my blood. Fidel left that mark on all of us. And so my last question now hangs in the air: “How do we live without Fidel?”
Wendy Guerra is the author of the forthcoming novel ‘Revolution Sunday.’ This essay was translated by Kristina Cordero from the Spanish.