Who Will Build Democracy in Cuba?

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I was 4 when I came to the United States from Cuba. My memories of the island are short, vignetted fragments; bits and pieces that I’m not entirely sure I completely recall or I’ve imagined them from stories. If I close my eyes I can see my “circulo infantile”, or day care, and I remember how much I hated the food there. I remember the rocking chair that my father brought from the Soviet Union for me, and frying an egg with my cousins in my grandmother’s tiny kitchen. I am Cuban but I am not entirely Cuban, a double life juxtaposed between rice and beans and McDonalds. Cuba is where I was born, but America is the way I think, the anthem that brings me to tears, and the land I call my definite home.

Going to visit Cuba has always been as surreal as visiting a safari. From the standpoint that I need a visa to get into the country where I was born, a place where visiting should be my birthright, things are bizarre. The people there face impossibilities that I can’t imagine every day. I can’t imagine a world without the Internet, without Twitter and YouTube and Google; a world without credit cards and fast food chains, liberties that are “self evident”, and air conditioning.  It’s a place where when you compare what the people make to the price of necessities, it might just be the most expensive country in the world. The island of my parents, with its classic cars, pot holed streets, deteriorating buildings, has always been in my mind a place stuck in another time that I don’t entirely understand.  I am just another tourist in my own country.

The fact that "anything is possible" in drilled into the mind of most Americans from an early age.  The government, we are taught, is by the people and for the people. From an early age, I asked my parents why things in Cuba have stayed the same for so many years. Call it being naïve, but I believe that people united are mightier than tyrants. My parents explained to me, time and time again, how everyone is brainwashed into indifference from an early age, how communism feeds laziness, how the government kills rebellions at the roots to prevent them from spreading.  But I always asked and asked and asked, “What if all the people started a movement together?” It’s possible. Citizens in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya have proved my theory a tenfold. So how is the mass population of Cuba not outraged? How are they not plotting their own revolution? They can’t miss the liberties and freedoms that they’ve never known.  Travel is limited, Internet censored. But does that excuse them? When Fidel Castro or Raul Castro dies, no fairy godmother is going to wave a wand and fix the country. There is nothing easy about change. And unless the people want and work for it, another political bobble head will inherit the role of dictator and life will go on exactly as it does today. 

For a nation of the disenchanted, the only solution for years has been to leave, and it is hard to overthrow a government from another country. But the answer is not in leaving, it is in staying and fighting.  I have friends in Cuba, people who have studied in a country where a hooker probably makes more than a doctor. I know a recently graduated Economist and a Psychologist, young adults with bright minds who have endless potential, yet their lives stagnated in a country that has not moved forward for 50 years.  Wouldn’t it be something amazing if, instead of taking the first available opportunity and a one-way ticket out, they stayed and built a democracy? Wouldn’t it be great if the people inside the island cared and were informed as much as the exiled, who read and comment on every political move that goes on?   

There are things I’ve seen in Cuba shows that there is something broken within the people, some ethical or moral code chipped away by living in a communist state. I’ve seen a 15-year-old girl riding around with a foreigner at least four times her age and no one bat an eyelash; stealing and cheating becoming a way of survival. There is a work ethic that no longer exists. It's been years since hard work has been rewarded, due to the "everyone is the same" mentality. This sea of disillusioned people, who are accustomed to the way things are and apathetic, are the ones that need to take a deep breath of the tides turning and become the voices of rebellion.

Change has a snowballing effect. It trickles through the cracks and takes a hold of people. I’m hopeful that someday Cubans will stand against the regime, take back the freedoms denied to them, and construct a functional government. It will take various tries and it might never be perfect, but it is what we, all of us, deserve to see. I used to dream about the day Fidel would die, morbid thoughts for a child, but it was always, in my mind, a day to rejoice. It would be a day when everything that the Regime in Cuba has done to harm its people would come tumbling down. In her most yearning moments, my mother dreams of an “after” where there’s a ferry that she can take to Cuba on the weekends, and her friends there can take to Miami, and we are all equal. I know now that no death will make these fantasies come true.

But one seed, well planted, can flourish and spread.

Years ago, did I ever expect someone like blogger and dissident Yoani Sanchez to come forward as a voice for Cubans everywhere? No. She is only one person, but one person who is daring to speak out against the government and reveal to the rest of the world the truths in Cuba, one blog post at a time.  She alone will not bring down a dictatorship; one person is not an army. But with her growing fame and her blog now being available to Cubans living in the island, it seems that maybe she can spark a generation. One spark can light a fire.

I am not completely Cuban, yet I am not completely American. I look at my birth country in expectation; the proverbial ball is in the people’s court.

“It’s frightening to know the number of Cubans who no longer want to live here, or raise their children on this Island, or realize their professional careers in the country. A tendency that in recent months has had me saying goodbye to colleagues and friends who leave for exile, neighbors who sell their homes to pay for a flight to some other place; acquaintances who I haven’t seen for some weeks whom I later learn are now living in Singapore or Argentina. People who are tired of waiting, of postponing their dreams.

But someone has to stay to close the door, turn the lights off and on again. Many have to stay because this country has to be reborn with fresh ideas, with young people and future proposals. At least the illusion has to stay, the regenerative capacity must remain here; the enthusiasm clings to this earth. In 2013, among the many who remain, one must definitely be hope.” – Yoani Sanchez, “In 2013: Reasons To Stay” published January 1^st, 2013.