If Venezuela looks into Venezuela

If Venezuela looks into Venezuela
Posted on April 12, 2013

Fifteen kilometers to the south of Ciego de Ávila, in the center of
Cuba, there is another failed town, the outbuildings of the demolished
central Stewart, that today is called Venezuela. One more ruin.

Venezuela was once a thriving town. More than 7500 workers earning their
bread and some constant progress in a sugar refinery that became the
third in production capacity in the whole country. One million sacks of
sugar produced in 1952. Big old wood houses that still exists, though
leaning a bit and unpainted. A Union capable of hard battles for their
workers' progress, without limits, even against governments or
companies, as it should be. Hundreds of residents members of different
political parties, lodges, religions, cultural societies, choosing to
buy amid different newspapers or crowds of commercial brands.

All that was reduced to One. And often to Zero.

Only one union trained to tell their workers that they must continue
working in silence even if the receive less each time; one school where
the boys learn a bunch of things that won't give them any prosperity
after graduation if they stay in that town or country. Very little to
eat in the street, the farmers market selling very tiny potatoes, some
bananas and malangas (a tuber resembling sweet potatoes),amid very
fertile soil.

A fish market of chopped fish 30 kilometers from the Júcaro port. A
boring museum with the stuff of Indians, Cuban independence warriors,
union workers and bourgeois that soon will be another office in this
poorly preserved town-museum. The headquarters of the Union that used to
give battles against the masters in the republic, demolished.

Huge billboards with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez announcing a future
that neither they nor their followers will be able to give to their
people. Eternal silences in the nights. And the refinery, that majestic
mass of human labor, that factory that 60 years ago exceeded the million
sacks of sugar, became a silent ruin.

And that is only the visible part. There isn't freedom, which is not
easily measurable, because people get used to silencing their wishes of
progress to avoid jail or being fired from jobs, they get used to the
same newspaper, radio and television; to the same politicians, to the
same useless currency. They adapted themselves to thinking about running
away, very far, without home or family when they can't take it any more:
that custom is the worst thing that happened to Stewart, to Venezuela.

This is Venezuela's mute drama. That could happen to the other
Venezuela, if they don't learn the lesson of others and vote badly or
remain silence in these decisive days, in which I forget that stupidity
of not meddling in the problems of people of different flags; between
the solidarity for other men, and respect for the very dubious
sovereignty made to protect bad governments, I choose solidarity. And I
also believe, as did José Martí and Bolivar — liberator of foreign lands
— that homeland is humanity.

And Venezuela pains me.

Translated by: @Hachhe

11 April 2013

http://translatingcuba.com/if-venezuela-looks-into-venezuela/