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Few performances illustrate the tragedy of Cuba as well as the one staged each year by the regime—amidst absurdity, propaganda, and repression—to create its unique "Workers' Day celebration on May First".
Employees who can't earn enough in a month to buy food for a week, students who work tirelessly in hopes of one day using their degrees to fly far away and live off their knowledge; ordinary people, battered by hardships, power outages, and a fatigue that is not only physical but also mental and historical—these individuals, I say, under pressures that range from subtle blackmail to blatant threats, wake up early, march, and walk miles to pass in front of the platforms where their exploiters, the country's owners, smile and wave, flags in hand, as if offering a magnanimous gesture of approval for life.
Why do Cubans parade? Why do we parade so many times, and amidst the chants, with the annoying noise of loudspeakers pounding our ears, do we defiantly disregard those who called us to march?
Who wants to see Raúl Castro, at nearly 95 years old, wobbling alongside the also "matusalemic" José Ramón Machado Ventura, forcing four or five grimaces into a smile to assure that everything is fine on the march to nowhere?
Who wants to pretend that nothing is happening when Miguel Díaz-Canel, the newly appointed president, arrives in his Adidas sneakers and his asinine eloquence calls on us —his voice trembling— to continue resisting and signing and battling and overcoming for the Homeland (his homeland)?
What kind of encouragement will they use to call us to continue building socialism, or the revolution, or whatever the leadership's constructive plan may suggest, when there are no materials, no builders, and not even the slightest desire to build anything for the children of those who "mock" us?
"No draw attention," the suffering mothers tell us. "Don't let them hear you," they plead, for they know that the regime spares no police dogs or "sanatoriums" like Villa Marista to "cure" any ideological "deviation" from the straight line they have laid out for us.
But more and more people are branding themselves with the searing iron of protest. And the patrol that ended up flipped over in July 2021, and the pots that have not stopped sounding since then in small towns, streets, and balconies; and the furniture of the Party that burned on the streets of Morón last March, are multiplying in gestures that may seem minimal, but that are cooking up, in the depths of the nation, another natural and definitive march in which the workers will finally scream their true celebration.
So, Caneles and Raúles, Brunos and Lazos, generals and colonels who manipulate us, perhaps their enthusiasm for gracefully waving their little flags will come to an end.
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