Cuban catharsis in a Jacuzzi

We went to see Jacuzzi, a play which premiered in Cuba. The plural has nothing majestic. We were four people: Linda (my wife), Gina (our daughter, also a journalist) and Rogelio Quintana, an illustrator and painter, who escaped from Cuba, who has been in Spain for more than 40 years. The fourth, of course, was me. It was a Tuesday night. The room, at the Teatro Lara, in Madrid, was packed. Actors, Yunior García Aguilera, author of the work and who represents himself, Claudia Álvarez –“Susi” in the work- and Yadier Fernández, “Pepe” in the work. All three were magnificent. They are prodigiously “natural.” So much so that they were fired with sustained applause and three times they had to return to the stage.

Nothing from Jacuzzi: a simple bathtub or, as Cubans say, “bathtub” filled with water and foam. Susi has worked abroad until she raised an amount of money that allowed her to buy a house in Cuba. Jacuzzi included. (There is no doubt that Raul Castro has been better than Fidel in that extreme, or less stupid). Susi has returned triumphant from her blessed jobs. Susi complains about the revolution in specific things: how expensive “everything” is, and especially that it is impossible to work to improve the quality of life, “except for dad's children,” who have everything going for them. Pepe is the revolutionary, son and grandson of those who have defended the “process”, and he threatens all the “worms” to act against them, but he admits that the situation is desperate in the face of a reality that is irrevocably deteriorating. Yunior is an idealist who wants to be a friend of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, because he does not accept the premise that there is a refractory creature. per se to the values of friendship and decency. He wants to be a free person and choose his friends beyond the strictures that the revolution imposes on him. However, it is Pepe who constantly asks and says “not to talk about politics anymore.” It is a declaration that the revolution imposes on him and one that he admits without hesitation.

There are two peak moments in the representation of Jacuzzi. One when Yunior tells Pepe, that despite the garbage he must hear when he defends the revolution, and the pretended gratitude that people are supposed to feel when talking about the “achievements” of the revolution, Pepe is still his “ best friend. The “teques” that Pepe must have learned by heart don't matter. There is and always will be a place in Yunior's heart to revere his friend. The second peak moment is the one that causes Yunior when he creates Archipelago at 40 years of age in Havana, next to Dayana Prieto, his wife, - monologue evidently written outside the Island -, and develops a strategy to get Cubans to demonstrate as if Cuba were a free country. It is not. They went to his modest home and staged an “act of repudiation” for him, in which his neighbors did not want to participate, because their neighbors knew that they were a couple of decent and hardworking young people. And so it is not, that He ended up exiled in Spain, betrayed by the very people who seemed to help him, accused of being a “CIA agent” and plotting with Felipe González for some unspeakable thing.

Welcome to the select club of “CIA agents”. I hope that from hammering this infamy of the Castro regime so much it has completely lost its effectiveness. Cuba is the only country in the world that gave the order written, in the sixties, when the generation of Archipelago had not even been born, to interrupt relations with the “disaffected” of the revolution. And the only society that dared to fulfill it. Husbands and wives who never heard from their spouses and partners again. Children who never heard from their parents again and vice versa. Brothers and friends who pretended not to see their relatives so that they would not associate them. At the height of machismo, secret services that spied on the crotches of the gyrfalcons' wives to surprise them in their escapades and demand that they dedicate themselves to spying on their husbands or get divorced. The slogan was very clear: “there has never been a revolutionary leader tarred”.

I hope that Yunior García Aguilera realizes that the only favor that Security has done him is to throw him out of the cell and off the island of Cuba. The regime was faced with a dilemma: kill him or exile him. They decided on the second, but before or simultaneously they would create an atmosphere of suspicion. In exile, there is no doubt, there is creative freedom. Last Tuesday Yunior demonstrated it by stirring Cuban catharsis in a Jacuzzi.