p>A Playa Girón hero told me a couple of days ago that he frequently felt nostalgic about those days when at only 20, he manned a mortar battery and went to battle with a smile, because all his utopias were intact.
Even I felt infected by his feelings as I reviewed images and memories with Silvio´s Preludio and Sara´s La Victoria, playing in the background.
The history, our history is so strong, so powerful, so real, that it plays those tricks on us quite frequently. Then we embrace it and feel that the years of glory are already in the past. The nefarious tendency to think our offspring will not have the opportunities or the utopias to feed their nostalgia come old age depresses and paralyzes us.
But on this April 16th., nostalgia took a leap forward; it jumped into the future. The utopias of the Girón hero must have experienced a greening just like mine, even when there is an almost 20 year age difference between us, and more or less twice that between him and the young kids who changed my perspective.
Fifty years are an entire life: it has been a long and hazardous journey among scarcities, ambitions and enemy aggressions, but the country that rallied in the morning of April 16th was the country in the dreams of the hero and in the dreams of those of us who never were heroes but had always aspired to become one.
Let anyone show me in the map of today’s world a place where a sea of children makes the waves for a historic yacht, where people of all ages and races who have never met before come together in sweat and joy shouting the same slogans; where all who expected a brief and quick popular parade, because spontaneity was its only mobilizing force, were astounded by a wide and infinite human wave.
Let them show me so I can believe it that there is another geography where the martial step of the military is suddenly replaced by the merrymaking of a beehive of singing children led by a young man whose father was taken by an act of terrorism and whose revenge is to create with joy.
But most importantly, however, apart from all of this, after all of this; let somebody find a country whose destiny is determined by consensus, where after collecting millions of opinions from its people, more than two thirds of the guidelines projected by the Executive were transformed to consider what the common people recommended.
Naturally, for nostalgia to settle definitively in the future another fundamental component is required; to have our President standing up before the nation delivering his account and galvanizing all of us with his improvised remarks and his profound and at times painful self-criticism.
That in his report that President brings to us time and time again the leader that is seemingly not there but is in fact present in every idea he put forward and was not materialized. And from that exercise of governance –another exclusive feature of our tenacious history– we all learn that nothing is perfect, that everything is improvable and that we believe in man and his material environment, but that we would be nothing without that deep spirituality which was handed down to us by Varela and Marti, by Cintio Vitier and Fidel Castro.
The fact remains that in spite of the errors of some and the deviations of others our guidance has never lost its track. And all the utopias are intact though their names may have changed and are not always found in the same places where we used to know them.