35: The unreal palm

The Royal Palm is our national tree. It doesn’t matter to us if its roots are typical of a weed, if it doesn’t grow a woody trunk, or if its lack of branches distances it from the biological concept of a tree.

Science in Cuba has nothing to say about poetry, verses that have given birth to our country with the force of forceps. Our greatest romantic poet, the exiled José María Heredia sang to the palms:

ah! delicious palms

that on the prairies of my burning country

are born of sun and laughter, and they grow

and to the breath of the breeze off the ocean

under the purest sky keep swaying…

In Pinar del Rio, the westernmost of our provinces and the so-called “Cinderella of Cuba,” in the central park of the historic town of Viñales, there is a royal palm that has been tortured for years. They pierced it with surgical steel during an international orthopedic congress. It was supposed to be a tribute. It could have been a work of the worst social realism kitsch. But really, it was a gross gesture of illustrated pride. In those remote idylls of tropical socialism, the New Man was supposed to become a giant to dominate the planet. We were cocky. Relying on absolute truth makes us vile. No country, no people deserve such a Utopia. We can end up massacring trees that aren’t trees and people who will no longer be people, just state statistics. No Utopia is fit for real people.