39: The city of slander

The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier called it, among other things, “the city of columns.” It seems that almost all Latin American cities from the colonial era could have been called this. Without columns, there is no city.

The Cuban street today is torn between post-revolutionary ruin and restoration—the latter thanks to covetous foreign capital. In the process of restoration, Havana imitates a historical movie set; it is not an inhabited Havana, but one of actors costumed and made up as stunt doubles. This is better than demolishing it to the very last of its columns. It’s like a bolero song: I’d rather be dead or see you dead than abandon your love. It is between the columns where again, today, Cubans trade in the narrow margin of initiative left to them by the Total State. It is between the columns where they cry out their offerings at the top of their lungs and compete among themselves, making fun of everyone and lying about their products. The quarrels between neighbors take place in a ring of columns, where punches lead to machetes. Perhaps this violence is a remnant of our wars for independence; our civility is pregnant with revolution. It’s among columns where the government contracts for its acts of repudiation against human rights activists in Cuba. It’s among columns, rather than among institutions, where our fate as a nation’s human beings, or human things, is decided.