By Miguel Barnet on June 28, 2023
photos: Bill Hackwell
May the sails of this ship in which we all travel continue to push this country with winds of the future and wings of innovation.
By the nature of my spirit and my vocation for social anthropology and poetry, which is nothing other than the seed of science, I am a defender of the noblest and most just causes. The Cuban people, because of our rich history and its intellectual maturity, heir of the wisest of Cubans and its most worthy disciple, always deserved a project that represented in all its complexity and its humanist dimension, and that project has been the Cuban Revolution.
José Martí was not mistaken when he wrote: “when one says Cuban, a sweetness like soft humidity spreads through our entrails”. Don Fernando Ortiz knew like few others how to interpret that deep feeling of the Apostle and expressed that “a new Cuba awaits us with its kindness and its spirit. I am going towards it, with it and for it”. And with his colossal scientific work, he managed to bring down many of the obstacles that prevented the renewal of the homeland. This renovating, reformist and decolonizing thought, together with the heroic emancipating example of the maroonage, is for the new generations an anchorage that strengthens the soul and roots it to the land. The Cuban, that singular and indefinable species, has known how to overcome his destiny with the most difficult of our historical contradictions and the most adverse of the circumstances experienced. We have suffered a genocidal and illegal blockade which is more than that; a hybrid economic, financial, psychological and political war unprecedented in the history of the continent and the planet. However, and in spite of everything, we assume on a daily basis a project for a fairer, more humane and more participatory country. The stone age has passed, the era of colonial dependence is behind us and we are now at the gestation of a humanist thinking that has placed us at the forefront of modern and decolonizing ideology. To change what needs to be changed as Fidel expressed in recognition of the equality of all people before the law, to find an integral society without the embers of a manipulative and retrograde past. “A society united by the likeness of souls is more solid than one united by communities of blood,” wrote José Martí. There is no more truthful and seductive statement. None more challenging.
We are not afraid of a new future full of equity. Fear, as I have said other times, is not Cuban. We overcame with gallantry the October crisis, the so-called gray quinquennium, the special period and all the adventures and misadventures of a radical and profound Revolution. We aspire to be a people attached to permanent innovation and to the scientific postulates of today in the face of the supremacy of subjective discourse in the new technologies.
Miguel Barnet
Tomorrow will welcome us with open arms. We will set an example to the world that will be our greatest pride. It already is. We do not possess great natural wealth other than the condition of being Cuban, that unique model that this country has generated. That is our greatest wealth and surely the most powerful and unbeatable. The one that no scientific disquisition will be able to define, the one that no anthropological current will be able to place in its academic canon. To unite the parts, to bring the fragments to their magnet has been the law of our existence and the golden rule in this new battle of ideas. With it we will honor our founding fathers, those who aspired to develop the concept of nation despite historical factors of our spirituality. We cannot forget the past under any circumstances, even when that past is murky and alienating because, as the Socratic axiom says, we would leave the future orphaned. That is the most cherished responsibility of those of us who are here today. It does not matter that others do not understand us, they will have the privilege, perhaps without knowing it today, of remembering us with admiration when the years have passed and the example of our generation has reached the height of the highest peak of the Sierra Maestra. Then they will agree with us because we will live in a better world. And that will be the most beautiful legacy we will leave them. The republic bequeathed us harmful effects, inherited from the colony, such as clientelism, corruption and the evangelization of money, among others. But the Homeland was reborn from its ashes with the encouragement of men and women who did not give up. And the Homeland is culture, as Don Fernando always said. We have rescued the ethical and civic Homeland, that of the values of Cespedes and Marti. Fidel announced it, the intellectual author of the Moncada was him, the Apostle. And he was not mistaken.
Our duty today is to impose the truth in the face of the perverse articulation of half-truths and blatant lies that breathes freely in social networks. And that truth has only one hold, which is Culture, the philosophical stone that marks our destiny. Decolonizing taste is the way, de-alienating consciences and going to the depths of our being. Since the much-vaunted post-truth ties us to pre-logical thinking and barbarism, which is nothing more than neo-fascism, the ideological arm of fake news. Culture saves us, it is not a slogan, it is a truth. Our being lives and breathes in culture. The Greek poet Pindar said it in Doric stone. “I know how you are,” he said.
The Greeks will always be our contemporaries, Jorge Luis Borges said. They will always be right, we say. May the sails of this ship in which we all travel continue to push this country with winds of future and wings of innovation.
Miguel Barnet is a Cuban novelist, essayist and poet. President of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and the Fernando Ortiz Foundation.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English