Quotable

Excerpts from “The Bodies of the Martyrs Would Be Borne by Us,” a July 18 essay (Spanish here) by blogger Yoani Sanchez:

For several decades we have disappointed the predictions of our collapse and, in particular, the repeated prophecy of a popular revolt. Cubanologists of all stripes have assured us, on this or that occasion, that the the island is on the verge of fracture and that the people will throw themselves into the streets at any moment.

Instead, the sidewalks are indeed full of people, but they are standing in line to buy bread or eggs, or to submit applications to consulates to emigrate.

The chimerical formula of explosion foretold by some relies on the element of economic strangulation to inspire a people to rise up in struggle. There are those who would like to give another turn of the screw to the United States embargo against the island and cut off all remittances that come from the outside. According to their hypothesis, Cubans caught between the rock of their needs and the hard place of an authoritarian government would choose to overthrow the latter.

The thesis that our reality simply needs more economic hardship for the social pressure cooker to burst is heard, oddly, most often among people who do not live in the country

But in the middle of that proposition, untested in practice, eleven million people, and an equal number of stomachs, would be caught.

Not only would this turn of the screw be unnoticed on the dining tables of the official hierarchy, but with their full bellies they would continue to rule over a people with only one obsessive thought: where to find something to eat every day. The misery that reigns in so many places would continue to be a mechanism of domination, not one of disobedience.

Where the result anticipated by the architects of the “pressure cooker theory” – that it will explode – ignores the fact that its detonation could provoke a cycle of violence that no one could know how or when it might end.