“Homeland is humanity,” said the Apostle.
Bearing in mind that he left Cuba at a very young age, I am inclined to believe that his intense pilgrimage through several countries led him to form this concept, far from the boundaries circumscribed by his birthplace.
In that thinking, the term “humanity” includes sensitivity and compassion for other people’s misfortunes, which is another meaning of the word.
In this way, the homeland acquires a meaning that projects us towards the good and that seems different to me from the one that Martí bequeathed to us in these extraordinary verses: “I have two homelands, Cuba and the night. Or are they both?”, where the night seems to be a simile of misfortune, misunderstandings, difficulties, loneliness, although I can conclude that in the midst of this situation can also be found the beauty that makes the human being great. But, above all, seen in this way, the homeland does not escape the light-shadow dichotomy, which is none other than that of good versus evil.
Both in Martí’s time and in ours, a homeland of light goes hand in hand with a homeland of shadows. Sometimes the actions of the former diminish to the latter. And vice versa.
On January 1, 1959, it seemed that Cuba was going to enter a permanent explosion of light. The initial jubilation was so great that very few noticed the danger. Those pioneers paid a heavy price.
Those of us who were children at the time and played carefreely, did not know that pain and death were still present and that the freedom announced by the victors was still a chimera. Then the light diminished, so did the jubilation, until we reached this calamitous situation, where the artificial achievements of the Castro regime have been shattered, among them the health services.
In the midst of the multifunctional crisis plaguing Cuba, a Cuban girl, Amanda Lemus Ortiz, seemed doomed to die by the tentacles of bureaucracy and apathy.
Amanda needed a liver transplant and had the right donor, which in her case is the main thing, but the necessary resources were lacking. Instead of humbly acknowledging it, the Cuban authorities unleashed justifications that provoked a wave of outrage on social media.
Amanda’s case is just one example of the current limitations of the Cuban health system and what should be expected of it. If Amanda were the daughter or granddaughter of Raul Castro or some high-ranking Cuban leader, the resources would have arisen immediately, but she is not.
The dictatorship, which does have money to buy patrol cars to repress the people and to build hotels for foreign tourism, did like the ostrich in the case of the girl Amanda, who was physically deteriorating in front of her parents.
But her mother fought back on social media and a noble soul who identifies as Lara Croft echoed her pain and got involved in the case. The GoFoundMe platform started a campaign to raise enough money for the girl to go with her parents to Spain, where she has just been successfully operated on March 15.
I was very happy for Amanda, for her parents and for Lara Croft, or in other words, for that luminous part of the homeland that refuses to die despite adversity.
That is the same bright part of the homeland that fixed the house of Fernando “the prince of the piano”. The same one that peacefully rose up against the dictatorship on July 11, 2021. The same one that anonymously sends food, medicine and money to the families of political prisoners. The same one that goes out to the streets of Santa Clara to give food to the wanderers. The same one that prepares prisoners’ files free of charge to send them to international institutions.
Against this luminous homeland goes the homeland of hatred and repression, which is none other than that of the shadows, made up of uneducated and abusive policemen, corrupt bureaucrats and politicians definitively alienated from the people. That is the part of the country that took pleasure in robbing journalist José Luís Tan Estrada of the medicines he was carrying for hospitalized diabetic children on February 7, because, according to State Security, such medicines were bought “by counterrevolutionaries.” It is the same one that focuses on manipulating reality, that feels contempt for the people and that is reluctant to any change that implies improvement if it entails some risk to its privileges.
Like yin and yan, so goes the struggle of both countries.
Those who commune with the luminous homeland should not fear the onslaught of the homeland of the shadows, even if against them the true mercenary press, the slave press, kidnapped and paid by the communists, pours out the most dissimilar epithets and lies to try to sully their honor, and then, on top of that, try to send them to court to receive the punishment of a law that only serves the powerful. They should not be afraid, because as Martí also warned us: “Honor can be sullied. Justice can be sold. Everything can be torn apart. But the notion of the good floats above all else and is never shipwrecked.”
It is my wish that God will bless Cubans who, in the midst of so much pain and uncertainty, continue to bet on goodness.
Amanda will live, doctors have said. God grant that it may be so. I’m happy too. I want her to live and grow up in the midst of the homeland of light.
Roberto Jesús Quiñones Haces