LIVING IN HISTORY

By Leonardo Padura Reprint | | Print |

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HAVANA, Mar 2 2009 (IPS) - On November 23, 1963, I was just an eight-year-old boy. I remember that historic afternoon with a vividness that always startles me: I was on the patio of my house when a neighbour named Merida entered and announced jubilantly that they had killed that “son of a bitch” Kennedy.

The notion of how the life of each of us unfolds in what we call history -that unstoppable accumulation of events and daily life- was a gift that would come to me years later after much reading and experience. I remember, for example, how a vision and a commentary received twenty-six years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy awoke in me this feeling of the “historic” that almost always comes to us without our full awareness of its nature. It was in 1989 that I chanced to visit the house in Mexico where Leon Trotsky (another “son of a bitch”, Merida would have said) was assassinated and a month later I heard that people in Berlin were dismantling piece by piece the infamous wall dividing their city.

The relation that suddenly occurred to me between this pointless crime and the end of an epoch sparked an awareness that I was witnessing an historic event of cataclysmic proportions.

Few countries, epochs, or generations have had to fight daily and systematically against such a burden of history as the Cuban people. For us living in history, and being a part of it, has been more than a political slogan peppering rousing speeches. From the day we first made use of reason, history has been mixed into our little lives and moved them along paths that she determined, at the margin of our small and often inconsiderate wishes.

Events like the missile crisis of 1962, Prague Spring in 1968, the Angolan war of 1975-1988, or the disappearance of the Soviet Union in December 1991, in addition to so many domestic successes that also affected our lives, filled our lifetime with history.

Nonetheless it has been a very peculiar historical process that has stubbornly pursued us and often dictated the shape of our lives and circumstances: the American blockade/embargo of Cuba, decreed by president Kennedy a year before he was assassinated. For someone who has not lived in Cuba for the last almost fifty years, the reality of the blockade/embargo (the term used depends on which side it is seen from) is difficult even to imagine, as is the burden placed on our lives by this US policy, which has been sustained by ten administrations against all logic or chance of success.

The training in living “the historic” that we Cubans have received has aroused in us the feeling that this punishing phase of history may be nearing its end. If two years ago then provisional president Raul Castro gave the first indication of an openness to dialogue (immediately rejected by Bush), now the significant silence of Barack Obama with respect to Cuba raises the hope that for the first time in many years the US president, assailed by grave domestic and international problems, is leaving his Cuba agenda on the back burner and cautiously (or patiently) watching what other elements of the American political class and society propose with respect to the embargo and other restrictions.

The fact that the president has begun the enactment of the programme of change proposed during his campaign is a source of hope for Americans. Certain developments have inspired the trust of the inhabitants of this Caribbean island that particular changes promised with regard to the Cuba policy will occur. Certain long-time supporters of the confrontational approach have begun moving their pawns to change at least the appearance of the game. This was the case with Republican senator Richard Lugar, who on February 23 presented a 25-page report titled “Changing Cuba Policy – In the United States’ National Interest”, in which he argued that the White House “must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances US interests.” Two days later the House of Representatives approved lifting restrictions on travel to the island by Cuban-Americans.

Is this the beginning of a different kind of history, which has pursued us like a curse. Is there sufficient political will on either side of the wall of resentment and the array of interests to take steps towards the normalcy that so many Cubans long for? Could my mother see in her life the fall of the prohibitions and laws that prevent her from seeing her son, my brother, in Miami, when she wishes? Will we make it to this other side of history? The future -the near future, I hope- holds the answer. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.