…con sesudo post sobre la gira de Guillermo Fariñas, “huelguista de hambre” que produjo uno de los titulares más hilarantes que ha soportado el papel: “Cuban hunger striker begins tour in Miami” (con permiso de Prince y Madonna y sus anuncios de tours), y a quien se debe, siendo de hambre huelguista, frase que entra en los anales -no pun intended- de la obscenidad (trans)nacional cubiche cincuenta y pico años después de la irrupción de La Niebla, porque calcada de la cruel pragmática castrista: “es mejor pasar hambre y tener dignidad que tener comida y ser indigno”…
A punto estaba de aquello, digo, cuando escucho a Bruno machacando el parquet en el salón, bailando al son de melodía llegada de esa Cuba. “¿Quién te menea así, cánido infernal?”, pregunto. “Los principales con David El Embajador, amo”, responde babea(n)do.
Principales y Embajador. ¡Cuánta excelencia! ¿El tema? “Huevo frito y boniato”.
Bueno, “el tema”. Sucede que no sabemos exactamente cuál es el tema. El de ellos. Todos ellos, incluyendo al clownesco Fariñas.
Mijaíl Shishkin desembarca hoy en The New Republic de la mano, ¡cómo no!, de Julia Ioffe. Shishkin, uno de los escritores rusos contemporáneos que más (me) interesan hace un espléndido repaso de esa recurrente maldición que imagina/constata la imposibilidad de una regeneración democrática en Rusia. Es decir, problematiza el maná del poscomunismo a partir del lastre de una tradición cultivada con criminal mimo.
Por mucho que el interés mayúsculo de este ensayito radique en su lectura del pasado y el presente de la democracia en Rusia, también tiene lecturas que afectan a todos los que nos interesamos por el devenir poscomunista en el Este y en Cuba.
In 1991, we were able to free ourselves of Communist rule, but we were unable to free ourselves from ourselves. We had been naïve. Everything had seemed simple and clear: our country had been hijacked by a band of Communists, and if we could just chase out the party, the borders would open and we would return to the global family of nations living according to the laws of democracy, freedom, and respect for individual rights. They were like the words of a fairy tale of an unattainable future: “parliament,” “republic,” “constitution,” “elections.”
For some reason, we neglected to remember that we already had all these words. We had Stalin’s Constitution of 1936, which was “the most democratic constitution in the world,” and we were regularly mobilized to vote in elections. We forgot that all the good words crossing our borders lost their original meanings and began to mean anything other than what they were supposed to mean. Who would have thought that the Communist Party would leave but we would stay, and all the best words—“democracy” and “parliament” and “constitution”—would become just the billy clubs in the eternal struggle for power and money in the new, free Russia?
The guards proved impossible to chase out because each of us was our own best guard. Even if you don’t quash the rebellion in the prison yard, it will eventually end on its own, and in the prison yard of our country it ended with everyone returning to their barracks. We had to live, after all. And order returned on its own, the very same order because no one in Russia knows a different one. The best bunks again went to the strongest, who had consigned the weakest among them to sleep by the latrine.
Imprimir
