By Alberto Reyes Pías
I have been thinking about realities that resemble one another. Thinking in the way the reality suffered in Cuba may resemble the situation experienced in a Concentration Camp in WWII.
There is a passage in Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that makes me reflect on the current situation our homeland is experiencing. It says:
“The camp doctor made an observation: the weekly death rate in the concentration camp increased between Christmas 1944 and New Year’s Day 1945. In his opinion, this was due to the prisoners’ hope that they would be home by those dates. They believed the camp would be liberated shortly after Christmas or New Year’s. But as the expected date drew nearer and their hopes were not fulfilled, they became increasingly discouraged, and more of them died. When they lost hope, they eventually died.”
We are living through a very similar reality, because the question most frequently asked in Cuba today is: “How much longer?” We are both hopeful and desperate at the same time. We see people die while waiting for needed medicines or decent amount of food and necessary energy.
Desperate to escape this merciless concentration camp, to see an end to this imposed slavery. Yet we are hopeful that this concentration camp will be liberated and that we will be able to “return home”—to that free, happy, and prosperous Cuba that we envision in our minds . We experience frustration day after day, we struggle to survive today’s blackout, today’s shortages, and today’s overwhelming sense of helplessness.
Each day that hope is renewed: “Will it be today? Will it be today?” And each day that hope weakens and twists in pain, trying not to be crushed by either the burdens of daily life or by that demonic voice that delights in whispering, “Nothing can change this.”
But losing hope is a luxury we cannot afford—not because there are currently external circumstances that seem favorable to our freedom, but because the time has come to convince ourselves that we cannot continue living this way. We do not want to continue living this way, and no power has the right to keep us trapped in this agonizing misery and this lack of opportunity and horizons. This is especially true when the children and grandchildren of those who govern us continue to make headlines living lives filled with opportunities and privileges.
The American administration may support our struggle—or it may not. Europe may stop flirting with and appeasing the Cuban government—or it may not. Latin America may find the courage to speak the truth about Cuba—or it may not. But regardless of what the world around us chooses to do, the time has come for us to reinvent ourselves as a people and to seek every possible way to break the chains we have been told for so long are impossible to escape.
We are deeply grateful for every act of outside assistance, every gesture of solidarity, and every voice that speaks the truth. We will never forget those who extend a helping hand to lift us out of this shameful mire. But we must not place all our hope in a liberation brought about solely from outside. Otherwise, that help may take so long to arrive that we lose hope and ultimately succumb to darkness, to the absence of freedom, and to the daily burden of hardship and deprivation.
The world may extend its hands to us, but those hands cannot help us stand if we ourselves are unable to raise our heads and stop caressing our chains.