Translator: Unstated, Yoani Sánchez
ruinas-habana
After the storm, may also come the storm, the hurricane, the tornado. A
few days ago we thought the punishment would be concentrated between
Monday and Wednesday of last week, that it would last only as long as
Benedict XVI was on Cuban soil. We lived those intense days between
prayers and screams, with full plazas and packed dungeons. Our mobile
phones, instead of bringing us communications, were turned into little
boxes of silence, useless gadgets. Only when the Pope's plane took off,
did they begin the releases from the cells and reconnect some of the
mobile phones that had been "out of service." It seemed that by Saturday
or Sunday the exhaustion of the forces of repression would give us a break.
However, every authoritarian father knows that after the punishment, the
child chooses total submission or greater disobedience. In some parts of
Eastern Cuba there have been street protests against the arrests of
activists and this has triggered a subsequent wave of the police
deciding to "teach them a lesson." Yesterday a group of officials and
agents from State Security raided the home of the opponent Jose Daniel
Ferrer and took him, his wife and other colleagues. The also took
possession of any object they considered destabilizing: books, magazine,
photos, computers. None of the witnesses recall having been shown a
search-and-seizure warrant, much less any document with the reasons for
the arrests.
The despotic patriarch knows when he should clench his fist, when
kneeling on rice, whips across the back, and shutting in the dark are no
longer working. He is confident that the increasing severity of the
corrective will make the nonconforming offspring see reason, but in
reality it just makes his rebellion grow. Even those who have never
dared to oppose the government, feel that these punishments — ever more
frequent — generate sympathy for the attacked, not the attacker.
Witnessing the repression thus accelerates the process of complicity
among citizens against totalitarianism. Every beating they give to one,
can awaken another who is pretending to sleep peacefully at his side.
Together, they have the chance to find a window to escape the
confinement or, instead, to come closer to the moment when they will
throw Dad out of the house.
3 April 2012
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