27: The damn circumstance of water nowhere

The Cuban Revolution was imported by ship. In fact, all Cuban revolutions have been. Many times these expeditionaries were massacred. Other times they were shipwrecked by their own incompetence or impatience. It’s as if Cuba’s revolutions historically depended on an exogenous impulse, on a centripetal force that forces the exiled to return to their homeland to triumph or die (read: to kill or die). Cuba is a scaffold. Perhaps that’s why Fidel Castro forbade the sea from the very beginning.

Since 1959, citizens have not spontaneously crossed the bays and coasts of our country. The shipyards are in ruins. We barely even have the culture of an island anymore. Fish and other maritime products are scarce. Thousands have been imprisoned for building rafts to flee to the United States and other neighboring countries. Our seas are our largest graveyard.

The Cuban Revolution was a terrestrial, pedestrian phenomenon. It would have dissolved very easily if it hadn’t been for the coastguard encircling the country, blocking outflow, excising the Caribbean, creating a continent, making of the island a peninsula of Asia or Africa or South America. With the end of the Castro regime, the Island can expect to recover its instinct to float, its cork-like constitution. Perhaps, as in Reinaldo Arenas’ The Color of Summer, it will end up sinking into the middle of the ocean, like a barren totalitarian Atlantis.