21: Power vacuum

“The vast cold sky. In effect, it’s an armchair, but it’s empty.” So Nicolás Guillén mocked God. Cuba’s national poet, he was a communist decades before communism was imposed on Cuba after a civil war where the democrats lost, which, indeed, has never been recognized as a war. The war went from 1956 to 1959 against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship and 1959-1965 against Fidel Castro’s. Guillén has already been dead for almost a quarter of a century. His work, specifically his pamphleteering, is not read by anyone, dragging also into oblivion the salvageable part of his poetry. Had he had the courage to live in truth, his poem “The Cosmonaut” would today have to be dedicated to the Council of State, an octogenarian elite in power about to be decapitated twice.

“The old cold pavilion” is that of a hospital or a funeral parlor where all that’s missing is the Cadaver-in-Chief, who after his wake will leave behind an “empty armchair” that no Cuban would dare to occupy. The caudillos of the Revolution have bet on a dynastic succession, within their own clan, not by way of votes required by the constitution. Whoever interfered with these despotic designs would risk being eliminated. The uncivil war of the Cuban government against the Cuban people—on the island as well as in exile—will not end with the Castros of the first generation. It’s called tropical Northkoreanization, and for now it seems like one of my bad jokes or an experiment in intellectual perversion.