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CUBA: THE INVISIBLE FUTURE
Leonardo Padura Fuentes
NOVEMBER 2009 (IPS) - The economic and structural crisis that upended Cuban society in
the 1990s after the disappearance of the Soviet Union created a
rupture in Cubans' image of their future, writes Leonardo Padura
Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been
translated into a dozen languages.
In this analysis, the author writes that from one day to the next
the hopes than animated Cubans disappeared and were replaced by a
struggle to survive in which we managed to make it through one day
with no idea how we would make it through the next. Individuals'
abilities and intelligence often lost their connection to
collective aspirations, and since that time only the most
skilful and daring have been able to forge for themselves a
better present. The impossibility of knowing where the island is
headed has almost always prevented realisation of their dreams.
The costly paternalism that the state has created and is now trying
to eliminate is also tied to this process of imagining a possible
future and depends on the actions the government takes, in yet
another expression of its paternalism. How and when
will things change? How will we be affected, and how much will this
alter our future? No one knows the answers to these questions.
Meanwhile the years go by, and what might have been a future is
stranded in the past, inaccessible and irrecoverable.
(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose
novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His
most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky
and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.
//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND,
THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM// (END/2009)
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