51: Descent from grandparents

We are aging as a people. The Cuban population pyramid is inverted. Our life expectancy is torturously long, as if we were a First World country. As if we were.

Meanwhile, many young people of working age leave Cuba, deciding not to have children on the Island. So we don’t grow as a country. It’s painful but beautiful to witness this apoptosis, the programmed obsolescence of the Revolution, a mechanism of resistance that no one planned but everyone practices.

We are a departing people, parted in two halves from the start. So we deny Cuba our descendants. So we carry Cuba with us in our genes. So we leave behind our progenitors without saying goodbye. When the most decrepit of the Revolution’s caudillos die, when the gerontocracy has been cremated and scattered in the Caribbean Sea or on the eastern mountains, then and only then we might return. Then we might rejuvenate ourselves as a people. We might once again be a habitable nation, inhabited.