A view of the Plaza de la Revolucion, Revolution Square, in downtown Havana. Photo: File photo.
By Paweł Wargan – May 12, 2024
In a few hours, I leave Cuba after two weeks in a land that seems to hover above time.
Cuba is anachronistic in both directions — towards both past and future. It exists in the past, because it has inherited the burden of underdevelopment. Like much of the world, it is haunted by the many shadows of colonial domination. Its cars are old. Its roads need mending. Its concessions to the world it inhabits tug at its people from different directions. Its northern neighbor — even in its advanced state of rot — refuses to lift its knee from Cuba’s neck. The longest-standing sanctions regime in human history is now compounded by the crippling and absurd designation of Cuba, a state-sponsor of hope, as a state-sponsor of terror.
It exists in the future, because it has built a project that, for most of us, remains in the realm of imagination. The 1959 Cuban Revolution overthrew the shackles of colonialism and, from the devastation it inherited, eliminated illiteracy; guaranteed free healthcare, housing and food for all; transformed the structure of land ownership; and built the most prosperous society in one of the world’s most overexploited regions.
Cuba has more hospitals than banks. It has more doctors than policemen — and has dispatched them to help as many nations as the United States has sanctioned. Cuba supported liberation movements from Angola to Bolivia, and played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa. Today, it stands firmly with the Palestinian resistance against the Zionist genocide. For six decades, the Cuban people have held the aspirations of the Third World on their shoulders. They are, to paraphrase a poem, exiles from the future, cast into an old world unprepared for their fellowship.
That old world has tried to expel Cuba as if it were a cancer. But it has failed, because the old world is the cancer; Cuba is the cure. The world of the colonizer and imperialist is the parasite that feeds on the body of humanity to sustain its grim futurelessness. The so-called Western world is the aberration — an anomaly so far past its due date, so deeply panicked, that it is prepared to kill children.
The genocide in Gaza and the blockade of Cuba represent violence different in form but identical in intent: to eradicate the very dream of defiance. They are warnings, commanding us to lower our chins and turn our eyes to the ground lest we catch a glimpse of the future from which the struggles for liberation visit us. But take a walk along the streets of Havana or Ramallah and you will see that the people of Cuba, like the people of Palestine, hold their heads up high. They are people who, to quote the Soviet soldier and poet Nikolai Mayorov, “rendered the word ‘humanity’ into flesh”.
Because they have not surrendered, we keep fighting.
