8: Paredón

The word paredón (wall), like the word pueblo (people), always makes my hair stand on end. That pair of p’s persistently reverberating in the parted bones of a country born with a propensity to violence. The Spanish Conquest and colonization; independence followed by the American occupation; the Republic pregnant with corruption, caudillismo, and revolution. The people with their backs against the wall, el paredón, where thousands have been shot without the democratic world being overly scandalized. The Left has the patent for repression.

It is not the claustrophobic image of the Iron Curtain—or the Sugar Curtain—that fell over the Island after 1959; it is the cadaverous image of those in every era touched by death. “Politics is the business of the dead,” says a Cuban mother in Jesús Díaz’s novel The Initials of the Earth. And so it will continue for a while.

However peaceful it’s painted to be, when the paraphernalia of the Transition arrives, it will not be from Law to Law as requested by Oswaldo Payá, martyr to Castroism. Rather it will be from Power to Power, from Elite to Elite, both within and outside an island lacking geographic frontiers, an island so isolated that impunity prevails. And so I spookily portray remnants of the walls and ramparts of the “capital of all Cubans:” because they are those of an uncivil cenotaph called Havana.