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Monday, July 13, 2015

Everyone Bears Your Name, Fidel

Everyone Bears Your Name, Fidel / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Posted on July 12, 2015

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, 10 April 2015

We Cubans are going to miss Fidel a lot.

Fidel was a spontaneous, almost infantile, assassin with an irresistible
charisma that eroticized even his bodyguards. Meanwhile, he could kill
just out of a curiosity to see his victims' last expression of panic or
rage. Like someone who naively opens up a lizard from Birán* or the
virginal vagina of an adulterous woman from Havana.

With Fidel deceased–in one of those fecal spectacles of running around
between stretchers and Mercedes Benzes–today, we as a people have ended
up alone with a one-eyed psychopath* and the pathetic pedophile, Eusebio
Leal.

Fidel was always covered in mud. He got in and out of military jeeps and
helicopters whose blades decapitated the rest of the leaders of the
Revolution. He cut sugar cane with gusto. He drank water from wooden
cups containing the saliva of peasants. He shot three-point baskets. And
thirteen-point baskets. He expelled priests and sent gays to
concentration camps. Or both.

He caught marlins like Hemingway and he was an ace at cross-breeding
cattle. He smoked and smoked and dodged cancer cells. He planted
everything and had a talent for reaping nothing; that cycle of sterile
stubbornness toward the Cuban people was a symptom of closeness. Fidel
was a loser that never lost, a Cuban from the 'hood.

Fidel was me. A guy that diverted hurricanes and brought AIDS to Cuba
from the African bush, in the white blood cells of his little hetero,
ebony-colored soldiers. He cloned interferon and solidified the
amorphous formula of Spirulina. He deported half the country and put it
to work for him in malls from Miami to Melbourne. And that's not
counting that he sent the first black man into orbit. Fidel, my friends,
was fearless.

Now in 2015, Cuba is on its way to democracy. The government in Havana
is saturated in rich white people who have made pacts with the rich
whites of the Cuban-American ex-exile community. The commanders of the
Revolution are being cremated on a regular basis and the holocaust
archives have not only disappeared, they've been quickly rewritten. The
future belongs entirely to that past that never made its debut.

The only thing we can expect from the sullen, one-eyed Alejandro Castro
Espín** and his Zionist-like secret police is massacre, but the
thousands who've died matter less than Eusebio Leal's tunic.The grand
nineteenth-century gentleman, the despicable thief who made off with the
property of Dulce María Loynaz, Lage's pal and other so-called reformers
who ended up in pajamas*** and powerless even to give interviews, the
historian who was punished for being corrupt and for making an embassy
joke about taking Old Havana to the "Granma Yacht mausoleum," in short,
the parish priest who shoves his pedigreed dollars up the asses of
Lolitas… he judges the Cuban people in public–a people whose mass
stampede abroad has been our only revenge against the tyrant–barely
equal to a speck of dirt on his Lord Spengler rain coat.

As a result, the neo-marketization between Brickell's*** totalitarian
tycoons and the corporate mafia bosses of Siboney****, must imply
recycling the best minds of my generation in the laundry room of a high
security prison. Nothing that happens in Cuba is believable. The first
democrats to reach democracy on the Island will simply be the fast food
items that Fidelism currently teaches at its world summits.

As a Cuban, I miss Fidel a lot. I miss his cadavers, who are my last
contemporaries. The maximum leader of the Third World calls us "lumpen,"
"scum," "worms." Yet he never stopped covering himself in our excrement,
the excrement of a prostituted nation during half a millenium of
despotism without government and without God.

It also makes me sad that, in his death, Fidel is going to really miss
us, his Cubans.

Translator's notes:
*Birán is the place in eastern Cuba where the Castro brothers were born
and raised.
**Refers to Raúl Castro's son, Alejandro Castro Espín, who lost an eye
during military training in Algeria and is currently a colonel in Cuba's
interior ministry.
*** In Cuba when someone in power is ousted (but not imprisoned) their
"retirement" is colloquially referred to as "the pajama plan."
****Brickell is a street in Miami where the superrich live, and Siboney
is a neighborhood in Havana where the elites live and ordinary Cubans
are not allowed.

Translated by: Kathy Fox

Source: Everyone Bears Your Name, Fidel / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/everyone-bears-your-name-fidel-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/

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