We Are Nothing / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Finally he’s left alone.

Bent over, his perfect Greek profile now that of a vulture.

There is some classic wisdom in the raptor species. Something of nobility in the adaptive gesture of eating carrion.

He’s not even remotely senile, as his enemies from the antipodes claim.

He is simply alone, in an irreconcilable world, surrounded by reminiscent faces. Traces of totalitarianism.

All around him, everyone understands the scene perfectly. They smile at him with pity. Take photos with impunity. They believe themselves privileged to attend the latest anecdotes of the Revolution. Also there is, notably, some impatience, or maybe nervousness. They know the Revolution will end with this hesitant body.

Meanwhile, we gaze ghoulishly at the vacant eyes of the Minimum Leader, the Companion in Chief, who no longer holds any dictatorial job, and, barely able to touch objects with an index finger, soon will no longer murder even something as innocent as a baby. After having imposed so much barbarity as a strategy of eternal governance, Fidel is now living in Braille. His death will be tactile. The Cuban rite of extreme unction will come to him on his spotted skin, perhaps at the hands of the Cardinal.

The senile, in any case, are us. Who allow him this saintly solitude, backs to the recognizable world, surrounded by repressors in an exquisite state of futurity, already ready to compromise our future in a new totalitarianism about to be designed.

10 January 2014

ON THE BAD DEATH OF A GOOD MAN

PLASTIC TEARS

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

In the Boniato jail, in Santiago de Cuba, a physically impaired man, a common prisoner (for me no prisoner is common), Norge Cervantes, blind, said in farewell to Antonio Villarreal, one of the 75 prisoners of the Black Spring with which Fidel Castro reacted to the Varela Project:  “The tears that run down my cheeks are from the heart, because I have plastic eyes.”

Antonio Villareal was found dead in Miami last Saturday December 28.  Day of the Innocents, may this noble child of sixty-something years who was tortured to the hilt in Cuba rest in peace. Even losing control in stages over his more basic reflexes, like controlling his urination. And his tears. He spoke with many crying inside and out of Cuba by telephone or on camera, but his olive green tormentors never managed to break him. That is why they savaged him.

Of course, nothing like that will happen to us. We are healthy and in control. We triumph, as Miami already triumphed and very soon Havana will triumph. Miami, a city largely shaped from Havana, in order to complete its historic role that after 2014 will rush to it: saving the Castro Revolution, managing a future enterprise for its militarized white collar mafioso. Putinism unaided.

There is nothing that the Cuban government does that is not marked by death (hence its true power in perpetuity). The liberation of the 75, for example, already drags with it with several deaths, including that of Laura Pollan, who would still be with us if those “liberations” had not occurred, because she alone knew how to defend herself much better from the assassin plot that took her life from behind and cremated her in order to leave no evidence.

Cardinal Jaime Ortega is architect of all these forced deportations and complicit in the string of crimes to which he in person is giving the consummatum est.  The Castros just supply the labor.

It is speculated that it was a suicide and soon the press will pardon him because Antonio Villareal had “mental problems” or “was sick in his nerves.”  Killing oneself is not a symptom of mental illness, but of spiritual strength: It is a blow to the arrogance of God or the senselessness of Nothingness. If he killed himself, it is because Miami deserved it. But, in any case, there exists not the least evidence that it was a suicide. Menaced or sick, what is a fact is that we Cubans had abandoned him, even from Havana.

We Cubans are all like that blind prisoner, but in reverse. Our tears are plastic, like the eyes with which we look without seeing.

Translated by mlk.
Note: The following video is in Spanish.

30 December 2013

Letter of Damages 2014 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

What if the light or freedom doesn’t reach us in time.

What it Evil prevails over our bodies and our exhausted demand for freedom.

What if Fidel and Raul Castro don’t die, as they threaten.

What if the surname Castro remains a cruel scar after Raul and Fidel.

What if Cuba falls into the hands of or never emerges from the Latin American debacle.

What if the United States doesn’t remember our nation any more.

What if free Europe never stops betraying us.

What if the truth is too true.

What if it’s too late to revive the broken soul of our people.

What if the Cuban exile never returns, as it already never returned.

What if even more violence lies ahead for us.

What if death, always death, looks us in the eye and undermines the love that remains in our heart.

What if memory degrades our will to love.

What if we are not.

What if we weren’t.

Cuba, nobody would have love you more than you and me.

31 December 2013