47: Idyll, ideology, idiopathic, idiocy

The streets of Cuba are an encyclopedia of the inexplicable. Stories are recreated and mixed up chaotically. Characters mutate and multiply and are killed. It’s impossible to interpret even a single line of such a narrative.

It is edited at times like a postmodern video clip or a boring experimental movie. So many things come together: shouted expressionism, collective surrealism, socialist unreality, pop silliness, comic—or cynical—communist cut-up with the gross genes of State capitalism, collage and plagiarism of shadow puppets—Cubanesque style—and the occasional touch of Havanachronical romance to make our island asylum more livable.

Cuba today is a floating museum of symbols, a Pompeii of the clotted Utopia, where the last trace of the Revolutionary idyll is the measure of all things. Cuba today is a set of short circuits, not of ideas but of ideologies that decay in the autumn, not only of the patriarch but also of the country itself.

Such an urban chaos is a clinical symptom of our endemic fear of freedom. We are the idiot grandchildren of the New Man; we have gone from the good savage to the good revolutionary to the good puppet with no puppet master. The very idea of the nation falters.