Almost all the years of my existence have been spent in a country that, after promoting a historical cataclysm called revolution, has attempted, against all dialectical logic, for us to continue living forever in a kind of arrested historical period or, at least, to It must move towards the end of time along an already determined lane.
And in Cuba, through legal and constitutionally established continuity, it has been confirmed that the socialist system came to the country to stay, forever and ever.
I have never been able to forget, however, that morning in 1989, when my mother, when telling her the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall, told me: “I didn't think I would live to see that.”
And the fact is that she, born three decades before the Wall was built and the Cuban revolution declared itself socialist, by the time she was sixty years old, had assumed that the world she knew was the one that existed and would exist.
But History is only a discipline with unalterable content when it is in books—and even then its unalterability is not guaranteed.
History is an unstoppable spiral that advances and retreats, it stirs and astonishes us, and does not allow the world (not even the best of possible worlds) to always be that specific stage that we have known and whose codes we assimilated.
And it is this evolutionary (or involutionary) condition of History that should warn us right now of the need to turn on alarm lights.
It is not idle to remember that the possibility of being born in one era and dying in another, and therefore having an awareness of the mobility of History, is a recent condition for humanity.
Until the 17th and 18th centuries, most people were born and died in societies barely transformed in the process of a life.
More recent historical events, such as the French Revolution of 1789, allowed many individuals to be born into a monarchy, live in a republic and then an empire to die in a restoration or perhaps even a Second Republic if they reached the age of sixty.
The movement of societies, the flow of time had accelerated with the engines of the industrial and social revolution and the possibility of acquiring such an awareness of History was one of the discoveries that crystallized, for example, in the birth of today's so-called popular historical novel, a genre that did not exist until the arrival of Walter Scott and
Waverley
, his 1814 novel.
The economic, scientific, and political development of contemporary societies has caused an unbridled acceleration in the passage of time.
The generations that have witnessed the turn of the century and millennium have had the strange privilege of learning that the world, as we knew it at a certain moment, will not be the same for long.
The disappearance of socialism in the defunct Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War and the economic and political triumph of liberal models were such radical and profound processes in social evolution that they even led to prophesying the end of History. , the arrival of a socio-political stage that, after having been imposed, would not suffer other major alterations.
But that world at the end of the 20th century was, among other peculiarities, a universe with a primitive cell phone, without another massive social network other than email and in which, let's note other insignificant things, you could get on airplanes with a bottle of whiskey and, in addition, smoking cigarettes for almost the entire trip.
The attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 and the war against terrorism – and the responses to terrorism – have altered our reality, while technological advances have transformed social, economic and political rhythms thanks to the powerful changes that have occurred in the digital universe with manifestations today as influential as social networks.
A revulsive historical process such as the coronavirus pandemic, which began in 2019, which would practically paralyze the world for two years, turned out to be an event that, by awakening the fear of death, changed many of our perspectives of the reality that we knew while It placed social development in a kind of meander through which the waters flowed at a different pace.
But let's think about the fact that vaccines against the virus could be created in just over a year because scientific discoveries had previously been produced that were already changing the world and our relationship with it, and among others was the possibility of designing the genetic map of people with the decoding of the human genome.
Without the same visual spectacularity of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the attack on the Twin Towers or the political alterations in the Middle East, with wars included and dictators who seemed perpetually removed, scientific and technological advances have had a decisive presence in the alterations of the world we knew to lead us to another, which we know little and poorly - at least I do.
But this present post-pandemic historical stage, which has recovered the roar of wars (which continue to be more or less as before, or as always, since they imply death and destruction to materialize conquests of territories), is currently looming over possible convulsions that They could change our perception of the world as we know it right now.
With firm steps, climate change continues to alter geographies despite so many summits and conferences that do not specify urgent and effective measures to stop the deterioration of the planet.
At a faster pace, Artificial Intelligence is transforming paradigms of all kinds, from academic and artistic (you can be asked to write doctoral theses and novels) to medical, economic and political.
Meanwhile, the possible mutations of international relations could soon make us live in another world.
Populism and pushes to the right can alter many present realities.
In this context, the European elections in June must influence the long and even short-term destiny of the socio-political-economic project that, with all its imperfections, has proven to be the most rational and feasible for contemporary societies.
On the other side of the world, in elections in which, as Fernando Vallespín has said, senility and insanity will confront each other, the possible re-election of Donald Trump would lead to revulsive consequences of all kinds within American society, in the relationship policy with Europe and with the Russia of the almost certain re-elected Putin, in the position of the United States in the face of present and future wars, in a world in which – Trump through – NATO even ceases to exist – something that I never thought I would live to see .
Today, humanity as a whole finds itself on the edge of a historical, social, environmental and even ethical razor.
The world, as we know it, may soon be another page of a transit of a mobility of History that has lost its brakes.
Therefore, from my domestic perception of living in a society that claims to be unalterable and from a reading of international political processes, scientific progress, and the dangers of an unstable global economy that is almost always in crisis, the panorama I see me full of uncertainty.
It is a historical pessimism that, hopefully, does not have more and better conditions to materialize in that predictable world to which we are heading, which we cannot yet fix, but which perhaps even makes us long for this other one of today, so imperfect, but just as we know him.
Leonardo Padura
is a writer.
Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2015.
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