FROM THE COSMOS TO THE CATACOMBS
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
The first and only hunger strike I remember was who knows when, in Ireland. Or at least it had to do with the Irish, that magnificent race which should not let itself be killed that way.
In a park in El Vedado, in Havana with an H disinherited until the 21st century, there is still a tally of the names of those martyrs of starvation. And of the murderous inaction of the English.
I grew, ate, shat and learned of other self-imposed hunger deaths as protest, in another island much closer than Ireland. And enclosed.
I am a biochemist. I know well how the body devours itself without commiseration.
I am human. I scarcely resist such tale of impiety. One does not need to be a doctor or in the military to feel in the molecules of the soul the shitty bite of injustice.
I’ve read that astronauts go through something similar when in a state of weightlessness. A black Cuban experienced it firsthand decades ago, while covering himself of inter-cosmic glory and racist jokes at the same time.
His last name was Tamayo.
Every story of the homeland is pathetic. Of a bloody irony, incredible, criminal.
Black Cubans are a race as magnificent as the red-tinged Irish. Both are Celtoids with bodies built for combat and hard heads that without much thought they may burst against the first wall they meet.
They are beamers of energy who in a disciplinarian State are stigmatized with ultimately fatal results. In our country there are surnames that only afterward will be mentioned without hesitation.
From the tribune to the tribunal.
From word to the execution platform.
From intravenous infusion to sangria.
From negligence to the morgue.
Not one, but a thousand and one transitions democratanatic.
With every calamity Cuba contracts: contracts the plague of its tired carcass. With each story of a man who did not fit into the Cuban reality, something goes crack in the muscles of the morbid pack, through some valve our national ex-spirit escapes us whistling by.
And the gong of the fugue sounds to end the mass, the suite of the escape of the most savage. And amid this tide fools who handcuff us, pretending to be zoocialistoid zombies in an effort to postpone our rite of Extreme Unction. And worst, pretending that nothing has happened.
With each of these execution platforms, Cuba perishes: digs not as cannibalistic but as its own despicable humanity strike.
Translated by: PitoFe
Post Revolution Mondays 