by Alberto Reyes Pías
I’ve been thinking about ways of seeing
It is said that “we do not look with our eyes but through our eyes,” and this is true even biologically. The eyes are our windows, but the structures that make vision possible originate in the depths of our brain.
That is why it is so necessary to think, to ask questions, to listen to others—especially when one holds power—because the exercise of power can change the way one sees.
Every country needs structures of power; that is not the problem. The problem lies in how those in power look at the people over whom they exercise authority.
One can look at the people as persons to be served, helped, and enabled to progress—people whose access to education, work, healthcare, and a dignified life should be facilitated.
But one can also look at the people as something to control, to subjugate—as tools to be placed at the service of those who govern, as pieces to be used for personal benefit and that of their own families.
Perhaps that is why, in Cuba, demonstrating is a crime. It is a crime to go out into the streets and protest the lack of food, medicine, water, and electricity. It is a crime to ask for freedom of expression and to demand the right to associate around different ideas and to create alternative political parties that can be chosen by the people.
And I ask myself: isn’t it also a crime to subject a people to hunger, to destitution, to the deterioration of health, and even to death due to lack of medication? Isn’t it a crime to plunge a people into long hours of blackout, into the loss of the little they have to eat, into the daily ordeal of cooking with charcoal or firewood? Isn’t it a crime to repress, beat, and imprison those who raise their voices to denounce what is evident? Isn’t it a crime to force an entire people to live under an imposed ideology and deny them the choice of different paths?
In Cuba, it is a crime to make public the faces of the repressors—and is it not a crime to lend oneself to harassing and detaining citizens whose only “offense” has been to say what they think?
In Cuba, it is a crime for Churches to hold public events without authorization from the Office of Religious Affairs—and is it not a crime to deny Churches their right to publicly express their faith in the ways and settings they deem appropriate?
In Cuba, it is a crime to question the authorities—and is it not a crime for authorities to lie, to hide wearily and hypocritically behind the “Blockade,” to continually present a false reality in the media, to treat the people as if they were incapable of thinking?
In Cuba, it is a crime to call for a change of system—and is it not a crime to have remained as the only system for nearly 70 years and to have sunk the country into material and human misery, into a lack of horizons, into the breakup of families, into a life of despair?
Isn’t arrogance, indifference, and the callousness of watching a people suffer and die while clinging to power—turning this island into a permanent prison—a crime?
Yes, it is a crime, and it is called a crime against humanity.