March 1, 2012
Yenisel Rodriguez Perez
HAVANA TIMES, March 1 — People in Cuba prefer to lead their lives their
own way. It's a need that arises when one realizes that neither the
market nor the state will provide a dignified and accommodating
existence. People become unilateral. They do what they please.
"Whenever it's possible!" add the pessimistic and the realist, and not
without reason.
That's to say that people do what they want within their possibilities,
within love and hate.
Many things are done this way because it's an effective way of making
sense of everyday life. In this way existence is politicized. We become
protagonists in the decisions that are made around us.
Low paid wage labor means little today, nor does the demagogic
nationalism that for a long time ordered the lives of people and their
life endeavors. These ideologies have only served to kill the
collectivist spirit that pervaded among the Cuban people with the
triumph of the revolution of 1959.
To kill individual freedom has created predispositions and
impossibilities for the enjoyment of the common good. For many people in
Cuba, collectivism symbolizes individual and family slavery. Things
couldn't have ended up worse.
Many people do what they want, but not to help those around them –
rather, it's to compete with them. Because of this, "doing what you
want" loses much of its emancipatory character.
However not everything is lost. I don't know if it's due to the native
vocation of fellowship or is owed to the resistance to a past that is
now dying, but there still exists mutual assistance in Cuban neighborhoods.
In the present is perceived a certain ambivalence seen in the moods with
which people carry out their individual and family projects.
On the one hand, the liberalization of non-state work has induced a
certain corporate harmony between those who work in the informal sector.
But at the same time one can appreciate uncertainty towards the medium
term future. It is a future that is designed without the direct
participation of these same workers and most of the Cuban people.
Doing what you want can be a legitimate form of subversion, provided
that relies on inclusive and democratic ethics.
It is a subversion that germinates in day-to-day life, in the joy of
breaking outdated rules, evading taxes, "re-appropriating" what belongs
to the state and saturating oneself in different forms of entertainment.
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