Monday, May 19, 2014

Who Said All Is Not Lost? Anyway, I Come to Offer My Heart

Who Said All Is Not Lost? Anyway, I Come to Offer My Heart / Orlando
Luis Pardo Lazo
Posted on May 18, 2014

My people are exhausted. My people are skeptical. My people are free and
happy. Over half a century of forced one-party rule in Cuba, call it a
dictatorship or a Revolution, has left us in n a redemptive,
irreversible, irrepressible loneliness.

Cubans escape from Cuba. That is now our victory, our permanent
plebiscite. We are leaving. Goodbye, intimate and intimidating little
island of my love. Goodbye, homeland lost and unforgettable forever.
Goodbye, finally, Fidel.

We did the best we could while we could. For decades and decades trying
to place a magic bullet in the heart of Castro. To kill death. Or
busting his head in his convertible Mercedes Benz, like Dallas. Very
diabolical, perhaps also very vaudeville.

But we lost that first marathon of who killed whom. We didn't even dare
to poison him. To put him in a wetsuit with skin toxins. To give him an
exploding cigar, to make him fly into a thousand splinters in the worst
half of our country. A foreign woman, Evita excited that she sat on
Fidel and squeezed from him a couple of olive green orgasms, cost the
CIA thousands and thousands and all for what. The Commander amply
demonstrated his criminal ability was second to none. Whoever kills
first, can not be killed later. That's how it is.

We Cubans knew, but today we do not want to acknowledge that
assassination was, from the beginning, the only magnanimous alternative
against Castroism in perpetuity. Our dead, disappeared, tortured and
deported numbered in the thousands in every generation and, in turn,
they are bodies that will count for nothing. Bodies that nobody will
count. Detritus for the databases. Latin America laughed to the rhythm
of the revolution. We were dying. But it already happened.

In the end, we are all going to die on a bed, in posthumous peace. No
more bodies in the streets of Cuba. We got tired of falling. A blow-up
pillow, this will be our best shroud. Like Castroism is not an
octogenarian orthography. Kills just coasting. His immortality discolors
every moment drop by drop. And, as the image and likeness of Fidel was
designed and imposed on the country, pregnant Cubans today give birth to
octogenarians as obsolete as he is. We are aging as a nation. From
delirium to decrepitude without transition.

My people are impossible, postnational. My people are the most perfect
possible. I wonder if it has not been this excruciating victory, at the
turn of more than a half century of dictatorship and revolution , we
Cuban catch ourselves, irreconcilably between them, making ourselves at
once ungovernable, unFidelable, condemned to, or better yet decorated
with, the malevolent medal of a perpetual diaspora. To err is preferable
to the horror.

Fidel, you won. We let you live. Peoplecide. But prepare yourself for
what is coming You will have no country to scatter your ashes. There
will be no history where you are glorified. There will be no time to pay
attention to you. We will be so happy without you. I love you. From this
unlikely unlimited freedom, we love you. We return you to the
disappointment, this proud orphanage from where you can never return.

From El Nacional, Venezuela

14 May 2014

Source: Who Said All Is Not Lost? Anyway, I Come to Offer My Heart /
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/who-said-all-is-not-lost-anyway-i-come-to-offer-my-heart-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/

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