Yoani Sánchez, and the censors of utopia.
Two versions of the freedom to dream

By: Enrique Ubieta Gómez | Source: | 31 de October 2009

I don’t know how to begin these reflections. I have just seen “Y sin embargo, se mueve (…desde Silvio Rodríguez)” (And yet, it moves), a staging by the theater company La Colmenita, for teenagers and young people, at their headquarters, the Theater Third Order of the San Francisco Convent in Old Havana. I know it is not time to write yet; that emotions should settle. But I will share some impressions with you, because later I want to talk about another show, not artistic at all, which I saw hours before the theater play. The staging by La Colmenita alludes directly to Galileo – it makes so explicitly in the title and in some dialogues – and in a certain way, to of Berthold Brecht’s work approaching the tragic end of the extraordinary man of sciences. I remember that work with affection, I read it with delight during my years at school – something strange, since I used to despise obligatory readings at the moment – and I enjoyed it when I saw on stage, by the Teatro Estudio Company, I believe, many years ago too.

But this is a different interpretation of the old dilemma: to save oneself or not – from punishment of lack of understanding or torture and death, as it was the case of Galileo – in the defense not of truth, but of faith, of dreams, of fantasy. To save oneself or not from the utopia of being able to find, to build, other possible worlds. There will always be inquisitorial judges to decree – in the name of God, or, paradoxically, in the name of Science or Freedom – what should be the limits of fantasy, of injustice, of knowledge. There will always be men and women with mutilated souls, who will get scared before the “crazy” dreams of their contemporary, not because they distrust the veracity or justice of those cosmic raptures, but because of a simpler and also more conventional reason: because they need to preserve the “normality” of their lives. The play directed by Carlos Alberto Cremata is supported by the music (and lyrics) of Silvio Rodríguez, and it can’t find a better hold. Back home, I was thinking that fantasy, dreams, faith in human being, in the possibility of the impossible, is the distinctive feature of revolutionaries. That Revolutions take place when the dykes containing dreams are broken, when hopes over flood. Hence the discomfort of conservative spirits, their tiredness caused by the endless navigation on undiscovered seas in the search of utopias.

And I remembered the show I witnessed in the afternoon during the already usual debates of the Temas Magazine. The topic this time would be Internet. I arrived a little bit late and the panel of experts had already begun their exposition. I suddenly found myself behind the exterior bars of the place, together with a group of young and not so young people – among the first and the second group, I found the usual cyber-politicians, with video and photo cameras –, who, like me, had not been able to get in the place where the debate would take place. Among the ones who were trying to get in were some Colombian students who presented us with some numbers of a rustic, combative magazine. Like all university students, they looked a little mad and it is obvious that they dream of transforming the world: therefore the magazine deals with international topics (the right of the Palestinian people to land and peace, for example, or the famine of poor people), and domestic (the repression carried out by the Colombian capitalist state). I assumed then that it was a good moment to deliver some numbers of the La Calle del Medio that I was carrying in my shoulder bag. I was about leaving but finally most of the latecomers were allowed to get in.

Many of the cyber-politicians got in with me. They dress like the Colombian university students, with a studied slovenliness that mixes hippie airs and intellectual poses, everything in designer clothes. They look like French students of the sixties. But there is something strange: Yoss spoke on their behalf and described them as average Cubans. A pretty and fashionable phrase. And however, they bring sophisticated video and photo cameras, satellite cell phones; they have personal blogs in Internet. They are young people graduated in Cuban Universities, who are tired of so much sacrifice: they want us to stop dreaming. Though they look like people in the sixties, they are more similar to the French of the ninety. They don’t scream on the walls: “let us be realistic, let us carry out the impossible”; they are not realistic, they are pragmatic. Their rebelliousness consists of repudiating and cursing rebelliousness. They are rebels that are strangely promoted by the system that is more afraid of rebelliousness. They have the appearance of “rich kids”, no matter what the real origin of each of them is; they are adopted children of a foreign and solvent Daddy, who exhibits and awards them as models to follow. They want to be “normal” people. Normal people, of course, of the upper class neighborhoods of any other society. Not normal people of the favelas of Río de Janeiro, of the Cerros of Caracas or the New York’s Bronx. They dress like the revolutionaries of the sixties and think like the neo-conservatives of the nineties. They love Coca-Cola and junk food.

Someone whispered in my ear: “Look, Yoani is disguised”. In a corner was Yoani Sánchez with an ugly blond wig and a tight black dress. The cameras of her collaborators – and maybe the pen of some foreign correspondent – will capture the scene: while everyone has fun in the place with the wig; reporters will say that she went unnoticed. But the detail is more significant: deprived of her usual clothes of simple girl; that disguised fitted better her aspirations of comfortable peace. Someone said she was disguised as a German woman, and maybe the simile is more accurate in her ideological desires than the physical ones. The real disguise of Yoani is her daily appearance. When she was called by her name and last name to speak in the debate, the media show reached its climax: before the microphone she would take the wig off in a fake gesture, to supposedly reveal her true identity. What mattered then what she said? The usual academic stage became then a platform for a counterrevolutionary media show, the space of a sterile ciber-chancleteo. It was a dreadful staging, in the end. There are bureaucrats who are inquisitorial, for a lack of wings to fly. They are instantly recognized. They harm, but you know they exist – because in a human society, there is all kind of human beings – and you avoid them. These young “rebels” however, live in disguise. They are post modern inquisitors. They talk against all dogmatisms, against killers of dreams, to kill once and for all, Imagination, Hope, and Faith. They expose without any modesty the allowed dreams: a house, a car, a good life. When they say that the Revolution ties them, they don’t refer to nonexistent intentions to fly: they mean that the Revolution doesn’t let them take care of themselves, make a lot of money, have fun in private parties. That it’s what pursues them urging them to fly.

Yesterday afternoon I didn’t understand well, though I could sense it. But the children of Cremata made it clear to me, among laughs, tears and songs by Silvio Rodríguez. These young and some old – elegant, sophisticated ladies and gentlemen – make up a dark and unnoticed court that – in the name of dreams – condemns every act of dreaming; that, in the name of Freedom, want us to return to a time when dreams didn’t go beyond the space of a home. Yesterday, it was the opening day of the Theater Festival of Havana, and almost by a chance – as art and farce – two visions of the future faced: the one appealing to the freedom of spirit and the one that doesn’t transcend the limits of the body.

Translation: Yusimi Rodriguez (Cubarte)

http://www.cubarte-english.cult.cu/paginas/actualidad/opinion.detalle.php?id=2475&tabla=entrevista&seccion=El%20Portal%20Cubarte%20Le%20Sugiere http://tinyurl.com/ykcadtv