Glancing at the TV I was caught by a phrase from Zenaida Romeu, director of the chamber group that bears her name. It's Tuesday and the energy of this woman, a guest on the program With True Affection, Two... had me sitting in front of the screen while the potatoes burned on the stove. She answered the questions skillfully, with a language far from the boring chatter that fills so many other spaces. In a few minutes she told of the difficulties in creating an all-woman orchestra, how bothered she is by the lack of seriousness in some artists, and of the day when she cropped her hair to appear with the maestro Michael Legrand. All this and more she told with an energy that calls forth an image of her, baton always in hand, score in front of her.
It is not her own story, however, that has me thinking when I return to the pot on the stove, but that of her children. She is the third or fourth guest on Amaury Perez's program who has admitted that her children live in another country. If I'm not mistaken, Eusebio Leal* also spoke of his emigrant kids, and a few days earlier Miguel Barnet* described a similar experience. All of them speak about it naturally. They discuss it without thinking that it is precisely this massive exodus of young people that is the principal evidence of our nation's failure. That the children of a generation of writers, musicians and politicians -- including those of the Minister of Communications and of the director of the newspaper Granma -- have chosen to leave, should make them doubt themselves, make them wonder if they have contributed to building a system in which their own descendants don't want to live.
This migration is a phenomenon that has left an empty chair in almost every Cuban home, but the high incidence of among families who are integral to the process, is very symptomatic. The number of children of ministers, party leaders and cultural representatives who have relocated abroad seems to exceed that of the offspring of the more critical or discontented. Could it be that in the end the dissidents and nonconformists have transmitted a greater sense of belonging to their children? Have these famous faces noticed that the babies born to them are refusing to stay here?
I look at Teo for a while and ask myself if someday I will have to talk to him from a distance, if at some moment I will have to confess -- in front of a camera -- that I failed to help create a country where he wanted to stay.
*Translator's notes:
Eusebio Leal is the Havana City Historian, director of the program to restore Old Havana and its historic center, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Miguel Barnet is a Cuban writer.
Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.
Translating Cuba is a new compilation blog with Yoani and other Cuban bloggers in English.
Follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yoanisanchez
Due to the Cuban Adjustment Act, Cubans receive a vast array of special rights, special privileges and special advantages which citizens of no other country on earth receive. You can learn more about these numerous privileges here:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/migration.html
Considering the material difficulties of daily life in Cuba, and the self-defensive measures which the Cuban government feels obliged to take, it's no surprise that some Cuban choose to live elsewhere.
Personally I know people like that, with whom I also maintain friendly contact. They're not bad people, nor do they complain about Cuba's political system. They just choose to live elsewhere.
Yoani Sanchez herself lived abroad for a number of years. She left the island legally and she was allowed to return legally. Now she spends her time denouncing the country to which she chose voluntarily and legally to return. Of course, she is very well-compensated for her work as a supposed political dissident. According to AFP, the French Press Agency: her prize amounts to "300,000 Danish kroner (40,000 euros, 54,000 dollars)". Anyone could live rather comfortably in Cuba on this amount, especially considering that they also pay nothing for rent, education and health care.
Where else on Earth do people get paid these kinds of big bucks just for whining? Yoani Sanchez really gives ingratitude a bad name.
Are you maybe talking about the destruction of all major Cuban industries???..... or…..
Are you talking about the transformation of a semi-industrial country in a country which only income sources are tourism, nickel, cobalt and money sent by Cubans in exile????
Come on buddy, it has been proven enough in this pages that there is no blockade and there is no problem between Cuba and USA but between castrofascism and Cubans.
In same way it has been proven that Yoani Sanchez did not left Cuba permanently but with a temporal permit and she returned to Cuba before the time of the permit was expired. Such temporal permits are issued by castrofascism to some people like artists, tourists and people that are invited by relatives.
You don’t realize that your efforts to present the visit of Yoani to Switzerland and her decision to go back to her country as something extraordinary must sound very ridiculous for the people in the free world that reads these pages???? …..You forget that you are not writing for extremely information isolated Cubans but for people that finds to travel out and in their countries as the most normal thing in the world.