What they did not calculate: our animalization
Laidi Fernandez de Juan
Cuba debate, www.cubadebate.cu
Our conviction as an unbeatable Cuban people tells us that no matter how dark the outlook is, the sun, whatever it may be, will rise every morning
In the midst of this chaotic situation we live in, where survival prevails and resilience, inventiveness and a resigned way of accepting the inevitable predominate, little by little we acquire qualities that we never imagined we could have. Those who surround us to the limit, imposing crude restrictions on us, forcing us into a permanent state of wakefulness which undermines our central nervous system, which is our entire body, they did not calculate the intrinsic nature of the Cuban people: the stubborn force to invent, to come to the surface, to transform mechanisms, things, things that were until then incalculable. This category of resistance does not appear in any manual. It is something that we have been acquiring over many years of shortages and their consequent alternatives.
I am not going to compare one period with another, this crisis with the previous one, nor how much we have sacrificed, because that would weaken the current state of immediacy in the face of the precariousness of our existence.
If half a year ago it seemed enormous to us not to have basic services for 4 or 6 hours a day (water supply, the essential electricity, gas for cooking, digital or fixed telephone connection), we have already reached the point of having these services for a few hours each day, which forces us to a gradual animalization, to develop skills that we never planned or thought possible to develop.
This does not mean that we are pleased or accept the transformations with pleasure, quite the opposite. Everyone's nerves are frayed, and on the surface, with a terrifying irritation that explains why we fight like beasts for the right of the road or for a simple bucket of water. We do it because, among other reasons, nothing is simple or dispensable.
We all need water, food, electricity, gas, medicines at any cost, even if it implies the progressive animalization to which I refer. There are many examples, but I will limit myself to a few.
Although it violates laws of human physiology, we have already developed a certain night vision, as if we were cats or bats. In the shadows for six months, in the early hours of the morning we see silhouettes of the dining room table, we identify the living room armchair and the bedside table without us falling. The ear acquires new capacities, also unimaginable before this war that we fight day by day. We are no longer frightened by the fluttering of some wrong butterfly that cannot find a window through which to get out.
Those impressive moths we call "tataguas", witch butterflies that sometimes sneak into our homes, walk around without us falling on with our brooms, as before. They no longer scare us nor do we believe they are bad omens of things to come. We already have bad things happening.
Mice nibble on the corners of rooms and the edges of skirting boards without much attention to them. Not only because we are exhausted after fighting battles during the day, but because in our new scale of values, feeling (hearing or seeing) rodents or flying beings is not important.
Chicken eggs explode due to the intense heat and lack of refrigeration. I can attest to the noise they make when they burst, but we already know that it is not a bomb that has exploded in the kitchen, but an egg, and although it is a fatality, it is not the end of the world. At least in the world we inhabit right now.
As if we were crocodiles, we bleed very little, or not at all. The other day a very heavy flashlight fell over one of my eyebrows. Under normal conditions, blood would have flowed from the injured brow arch, but not now. As if the body, the platelets and the physiological cascade of coagulation understood that there are no threads or suture needles, no disinfectants or cotton or gauze or light in the polyclinic, the forehead, the eyebrows and the face are all repressed, and not a bump leaves a record of the trauma. We are reptiles, cats, bats.
We are like "wise elephants," "gentle dolphins" or "multicolored butterflies" accepting a new way of life, a way of life which is constantly changing. It may happen that the blessed hour of electricity comes to us in the middle of the night. In a state of constant wakefulness, we don't even gossip. Each member of the family throws himself out of bed with cheetah speed because we know that in a matter of minutes we have to charge the few pieces of equipment we have, cell phones, fans, as well as washing, cooking, cleaning and perhaps ironing even if it is 3 in the morning.
We look like anxious guinea pigs doing everything at once, with frenzy. Then, like sleepy koalas, we spend the rest of the day regaining the tactile sensitivity of a mole when darkness arrives (metaphorical and real).
I am convinced that our oppressors did not calculate that these unusual and unnatural adaptations would allow us to survive. The vast majority of us already belong to the so-called "ordinary Cubans," and we go to the market as if we were members of a team of ducks, geese or ants, in a silent line to get food, dragging carts with wheels, or wooden boxes adapted for such purposes.
No matter how hard, difficult, cumbersome and suffocating our corrosive daily life is, no matter how animalized we are, and no matter how distant hope may be, we are not going to allow ourselves to be defeated.
Translation by NSCUBA (Nova Scotia)
