Living Under Tyranny: A Letter from Cuba

Living Under Tyranny: A Letter from Cuba

Adrien Ponderal

I live in a complicated historical moment; I am experiencing the year when we seem closest to the fall of the longest-running dictatorship in the Americas. This is not a political statement, nor is it an article that could be read in an informative magazine; I would like to give it a human touch, the very nuance that the Cuban revolution (yes, revolution, without a positive connotation, obviously) failed to provide its people, who were left with a generational, institutionalized, and anthropological misery, as well as a profound existential impact caused by the consequences of such a complex process to summarize for those who have not experienced a tyranny firsthand.

All kinds of mistreatment, countless humiliations, abuse of power, legal loopholes... For God's sake! They have turned— the best Cuban, the Cuban— life into a yogurt. I find it essential to write during these times, to document the desperation of a government of cowards and corrupt officials; of how the already dire living conditions of a people subjected to madness, to the unthinkable, have deteriorated even further, abandoned to death, to the most primal, carnivorous survival; stripped of principles, rejecting morality.

I belong to that oppressed and defeated people, just as the millions of Cuban migrants crammed into other corners of the world belong, where they had to go to build their lives because in their homeland, the resources always vanished or simply never existed. I feel an enormous passion for freedom, a desire forged somewhere I cannot pinpoint; perhaps so many years of oppression have driven these fervent longings for independence and justice.

I detest these tyrants; I hate what they have done to my people, what they have turned my Havana and my country into. Exile has represented, since the onset of the catastrophe, the only path to a dignified life, away from duty, away from the construction of the "new man" and the socialist society; but, at the same time, also far from a sense of belonging.

I hope that, in the near future, those many Cubans can return, embrace those who are here, and step together on the same ground: free, sovereign, and democratic. Cuba is such a beautiful country that not even the visible scars of an atrocious communism have managed to erase the Taino etymology of its name: that of a great land, that of a fertile place.