Raulito Torres
They say there are drums that can be heard even in the deepest sleep. The drums of an aircraft carrier, announced 100 yards from our Malecón, are not celebratory drums, my friend. They are the roll of a funeral announced for sanity. President Trump, with his characteristic coldness, moves pieces on someone else’s chessboard, believing that by bringing the steel close enough to graze the scales of our green alligator, fear will paralyze us, the Revolution will crumble like a sandcastle, and we Cubans will run away…
Perhaps he observes the horror of the nearly 180 girls massacred in Iran and thinks: “Terror works.” But the man from the North doesn’t quite understand the true nature of our fear. Because yes, we are afraid. But not the metallic block floating on the horizon, but the pain of crushed innocence… something that propels the Cuban forward with tremendous force…
However, what they haven’t been able to decipher in Washington for over sixty years is the mystery of our psyche. They believe that the Cuban, accustomed to hurricanes and scarcity, will bend.
A grave miscalculation, my friend. When the Cuban feels cornered, when the ring closes until it cuts off his breath, he doesn’t flee. He transforms. I’m not talking about the fear of bombs, that immediate and atrocious panic that cuts short the lives of children, young people, women and the elderly. I’m talking about a deeper and more dangerous fear: the fear of those who have nothing left to lose… Oh, damn!
A people who transform their anguish into resistance are a mythological beast. We are the “cornered animal,” that creature who, wounded in its lair, doesn’t measure the enemy’s strength, but rather the depth of its own wound. Therein lies the true danger; we would be a silent missile, undetectable by radar, traveling straight to the heart of the United States. Because we are not far away; we are close, almost intertwined by blood and geography.
If Havana explodes, the shrapnel… the pent-up fury of an entire island will cross the Florida Straits faster than any rocket. The average American, the one who works, the one who loves their children in Ohio, in Texas, or in Miami itself, must know this: playing Russian roulette with a people 100 yards away is not foreign policy; It is collective suicide.
You are not safe behind a wall of water. In this case, terror is not a video game; it is a shockwave that destroys those who receive it, but also destroys and dehumanizes those who unleash it.
If we let the drums of war drown out the sound of guitars, tragedy will transcend borders.
It is time for both peoples to awaken from the spell of the white doves. May the American people, who also suffer the excesses of imperial power, know today more than ever that their true enemy is not on this island that dances and creates, but in that perverse logic that seeks to set fire to our shared backyard for the benefit of a few with electoral interests.
The union of the souls of both shores is the only real shield against war.
We do not want pity, we want respect. We do not want handouts, we want peace. There is still time to get off that death machine. May our proximity once and for all not be a geographical curse, but the miracle of two worlds that… Embraced, they can be saved from the abyss.
Because if the cornered animal has to defend itself, believe me, Lord of the North, the uproar will not distinguish between executioner and innocent, and the heart of the empire will bleed, too. And that blood, regardless of language, WILL HURT, TOO!
IMAGE CREDIT: Taken from the Facebook page of Cuban troubadour Raulito Torres
[ SOURCE: www.cubainformacion.tv ]
