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Editor's Note: Camilo Egaña is the Camilo driver . The opinions expressed in this article are exclusive to the author.
(CNN Spanish) - On November 9, 1989 the world changed.
The Berlin Wall fell apart and 20 days later my son Diego was born in Havana.
The Cubans did not see the immense joy of the people, moving on to the other side; screaming, kissing and toasting with champagne.
Nor do we detect that “static electricity” of those who, with hammers, undertook it against the Wall.
Nor did we see the Germans on the communist side, victims of the capitalist glow, when they first entered a supermarket on the other side.
We Cubans also did not see the arrival of man on the moon in 1969 because that man was gringo.
But the crash of the collapse of the Wall came to us somehow.
The Wall was the finding of a monumental failure.
Cuba had ceased to be a Soviet protectorate and also collapsed.
Hungry and scabies - because there was no soap - he went to television and radio and came back like a zombie to tune in to shortwave radios: Poland was falling today, and Romania would fall tomorrow and so on.
My son turned out to be a sick baby for whom there was nothing but aspirin.
His grandmother Miriam calmed him by telling him some crazy fables that talked about the sad whale who wanted to cross the Wall to meet his friends in Miami.
As if Berlin and Miami were only separated by those 168 kilometers of extension that the Wall came to have.
In Berlin, joy. In Havana, the lost illusions.
With the Wall the dictatorships of Eastern Europe collapsed; The Iron Curtain, which I had known as a child, fell from the Reader Digest Selections that my great-aunt Coloy hid like a wasp magpie in her closet.
And three months after the Wall, the Sandinista revolution collapsed in Nicaragua.
And 30 years later, all the pillars of politics as a civic exercise seem to have collapsed as well.
The one who shouts the most in Poland or Italy or Brazil wins. Or United States.
You have to be very brave to dare to talk today about the idea of the future.
Argentine journalist and novelist Martín Caparrós warns that “if democracy produces monsters, the first thing is to see what to do with the monsters; the second, right away, what with democracy. ”
Follow the collapse.
And still someone seems to bother around when I say that I no longer believe in my shadow.
Democracy Berlin Wall Policy