Memories are written at the end of a life and dictionaries with a man's phrases are compiled when you know he's finished, incapable of producing new ideas. To be reduced to the pages of a book, when once you held the microphone in front of a million people, must be a consolation as tasteless as the pap they administer to a patient. The Dictionary of the Thoughts of Fidel Castro, by the researcher Salomon Susi Sarfati, will be the farewell of the loquacious leader who flooded our life -- every minute of it -- with his uncontrolled rhetoric.
According to a press release from Prensa Latina, "exquisite and meticulous in his selection, the author divides the dictionary into the 20 letters of the Spanish alphabet (except k, q, w, x, y, z)..." As I am obsessed with the penultimate consonant that gives its name to this blog, I wonder if in the more than 1,978 aphorisms none will have referred to someone of "Generation Y." In this Island full of Yordankas, Yohandris and Yunieskies, how is it possible that "the essence of the thinking" of someone who was in power nearly fifty years, does not contain a reference to us. It seems that the book contains only concepts, not people, which, for me, makes it a collection of samples of entelechy, a compendium of incomprehensible ideas.
Perhaps today -- his 83rd birthday -- the orator of days gone by has this dictionary they have created to flatter him, to tell him that his work will live on and be read for centuries and centuries. He will look at the year of publication and wonder if they will make an expanded edition with the contents of his next reflections. He will not notice the lack of the "Y", this little and insignificant letter which has not turned out as he would have liked: selfless, altruistic, disciplined and stoic. Probably he will delight more in the "R" of revolution or in the "I" of imperialism, but his great gaze will not reach the end of the alphabet. There, crouched and hidden, is this letter in the form of a slingshot, the elastic tensed in the direction of tomorrow.
Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English Translation.