The empty book

The man told us that we could not film. He looked like one of those retired military officers who later the state doesn't know very well what to do with them. It is an armament park that expired, people who are like saved bullets, who got gunpowder and started to do something without purpose. Cuba is full of such people, sad subjects of sixty, seventy, who prepared for a war or an invasion that never took place and are now distributed everywhere, guarding places that no one will destroy or take for arms anymore Well, it would be like stabbing a dead man.

We were in the Martí stadium, in front of the Malecon in Havana. A friend wanted to record with me the chapter of a series dedicated to the censorship of thought and art in the country and the use of language within a totalitarian society. The words, how to recover them, how to give them a new meaning or their corresponding meaning, how to reestablish the logical relationship between fact and sign? Matters that have been, for years, my obsession.

We had a Sony camera and a basketball, we wanted some plans to fill. Some dribble, some basking, some triple failed, those things. The custodian refused, the regulation of the stadium forbade it. He said it without conviction, even sorry, as who wants to let us know that he is just the instrument that he has to ban, but not who has thought or designed that prohibition. We asked him why, it was absurd. He gave shame. He told us to talk to the director. If it were for him, we were already filming.

We went to the principal's office, an equally sad, younger and no less affable man. He also wanted to authorize us, but he constantly looked at the custodian. None dared to say yes, neither completely trusted the other. We were in the dark at mid-morning, the office was a kind of bunker under the stadium stands.

They looked for each other, the custodian and the director, to support each other in that gigantic violation of the disciplinary regulation that both were willing to commit, but each denied responsibility in the other with subtle suspicion. They were gripped by an invisible clamp, the interior surveillance machine.

I had them almost convinced, when I said they were images for a documentary. That word fractured their heads. "Documentary? How documentary! No, no, by God, a documentary is not here," said the director. "It's only two or three videos and we're leaving," I replied, but he explained that the issue with documentaries was complicated. Anyone came and filmed the stadium and then took out that Cuba was destroyed. "And the truth is that it is destroyed [the stadium]. A few days ago another piece of the roof of the stands fell, but it is not fair that they do that, because in other countries the same thing happens. In Washington the same thing can happen too, Don't you think? " "Sure," I replied. Then the director was emboldened and authorized us to film. He said everything was running on his own. At that moment I was inspired by tenderness.

We left the office and looked at the stands and the soccer field. A barren field and a construction full of debris and loose irons. The director was right. There was a picture there, another one that could talk about the growing poverty and destruction of Cuba. But it is not a similar postcard, a postcard already infinitely repeated, what best encapsulated that morning what the country was, but the director himself: his fear, his words, his reservations, his arguments, the minutes of a conversation in which the man confessed his last assignment, to protect the body of the official ideology from the eye of reality, or to try that the body of reality was only observed by the eye of the official ideology, that the facts were not filtered or seen. He had not been appointed director of the Martí stadium to fix it, since there was nothing to do with it, but to hide it.

In the map of a new language the words are the concrete territory, while it is the words that are established directly in reality, and it is the facts, the relationship between objects, which enjoy inaccuracy. The Marti stadium turned to pieces, or the shortage of fuel at gas stations, are in totalitarianism grammatical errors. The copyist tyrant of an imported doctrine does not want a grumpy reader to denounce the outrageous syntax of his particular sense of justice or prosperity, but that does not mean that there are no readers who were taught to read and who continue to read the jargon of that bad grammar. There they are, to prove it, the director of the stadium, the custodian, and also, of course, the majority of Cubans that one is both inside and outside the island.

Estanislao Zuleta talks about "the overvaluation of images as indicators of essences". A destroyed girl is opposed by a smiling girl in a school. In a row to buy eggs; A doctor with his gown auscultating a patient. To a policeman delivering sticks; a beach with sun and a mulata zalamera. At twenty dollars of average monthly salary; the minimum infant mortality rates per thousand live births.

I no longer speak of the truthfulness or not of any of these images, but of the terms in which the duel for the reason has been raised. That unstoppable process of segmentation and, from there, both positive and negative idealizations (sometimes converging both on the same icon, say Che Guevara) functions as a loop of historically recycled forces that ends up consolidating the rhetorical appeal of ideology dominant.

The totalitarianism assimilates that they take the photo of the Martí depauperado stadium, but what totalitarianism does not assimilate, nor does it have to justify, is the director of the stadium, and that is the Machiavellian method of deception with which the system operates on its faithful. Those who believe themselves vigilant are, in truth, inmates. The airy bleachers are seen from the street, what is not seen is the office in gloom. The director has been led to believe that he is there to hide the stadium from the bad eyes, but it is the stadium that is there to hide it from him, because what absolute power does not resist is the narrative will of history, the living manifestation from an unfinished story, that sequential evidence that, after all, every person is.

Bernie Sanders recently warmed the mood of Cuban-American exile when he said that Fidel Castro had done things he considered good, such as teaching people to read and write. It is uncomfortable that a shrewd politician like Sanders gives in full electoral contest to a sentimental weakness of youth, in which he is mistaken just because he segments. Cut a piece of a loom with the scissors of your desire.

The 1961 literacy campaign is part of a whirlwind of social transformation in which, simultaneously, control structures are being formed that will make those literate themselves then have, like some of their very possible destinations, work on farms forced labor, thrown into rafts into the sea, repudiate in the midst of the mob those who decided to throw themselves in rafts, collect after several decades an insufficient withdrawal and guard recreational centers whose roofs can collapse at any time, or, the most degrading of the roads, become exegetes who deny or qualify all of the above.

The question of where the revolution ends and the dictatorship begins in Cuba not only would never have a precise answer, nor any date to find, but has become, at least until the dictatorship does not end, in a question posed in immoral terms , because it only extends the life of the broken regime after the fruitless search for an ideal or untouched moment, when every revolution is always a muddle. This, in turn, has other important consequences, since the lengthening in the present of the Cuban dictatorship brings more and more shortening in the past of the time of the revolution, if it is not already that it has been swallowed completely. That is the reactionary way in which nostalgia works and the soft character of a left that reduces the affections to still images and does not claim them as a successive and unfinished power.

Sanders' start-up mistake drags other serious slips, because it implicitly assumes that a people must comply with their alphabetization, and avoids recognizing that a political regime of such nature is in force in Cuba that the most recent merit that occurs to them mentioned happened Almost sixty years. In the same way, the laughable communist accusations that now fall upon him, for having said these words, do not escape either the hysterical sublimation of a moment, the mythification or the definite definition of someone from a punctual statement and, above all, secondary within their interests and purposes.

Exceptionalism is the evil suffered by a people who do not want to be recognized as a footnote in the books that are other foreign peoples. And worse yet. Exceptionalism, which in the case of Cuba adopted the totalitarian form of Castroism, implies having accepted that they sent us as sentimental footnotes in the books that are other people's foreign peoples, and, despite literacy, having left the our book

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