By Leonardo Padura Fuentes

 

 

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//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//

(FIN/2009)