New Year's Blues

I have started the New Year with a strong 'down' feeling. Well, is not really 'down' but almost a 'numbing' feeling. Things seem very 'dejá vue´. There is inside me more boredom and inaction --and deep anxiety- that actual unhappiness.

Maybe is a logical sensation when the news from Haiti are so horrible --and have dominated the media every second. And the images are so tragic, so horrendous, so beyond what human suffering could be --that I have started to look away at the TV screen, changing channels sometimes, refusing to witness so many terrible things ---because my limits has been reached.

I have always blamed my low threshold to face and act on human suffering, to the early days of the Cuban Revolution and all the violence it brought to my life, when I was barely entering my adolescence.

The hatred, the screaming, the eyes full of envy and resentment of so many strangers that roamed around my country with machines guns and berets, was part of a new and shrilly Havana. And although now, looking back, I realized I witnessed a new moment in History, I also wish it had not shaken up my future in such a blunt and cruel way.

Visiting my uncles Paco and Gustavo in horrible and cruel revolutionary prisons, where my mother and I were treated like delinquents, insulted, searched, and humilliated without any reason --marked me for Life! As well as seeing the violence of those first years in the new 'communist' Cuba, filled with so much injustice -instead of the 'social justice' it had promised!- and so much abuse of power. Oh yes, the abuse of power was one of the worst things then!...Seeing people switch parties -with the typical cinicism that politics seem to bring with all changes - was shocking and ugly. Mass executions without trials were published in the papers every day --and if someone did not like you, or wanted to have your car, or your house --sending you to prison under false accusations was common, easy and totally ignored by the new authorities.

No, no...I am not going to narrate now -again, the searing pain of what happened to my country 51 years ago. I can see them as clearly now as when they just had happened. But I cannot bore you with these memories. It's just my explanation for my present rejection to pain and violence. And my desire to escape them.

My 'quota' of suffering for these matters has been filled for many, many years...Even my physical strength is low when it comes to facing these grim circumstances that constantly shake the world.

Thus my escapism for looking inside me for moments of harmonious solitude. Thus my search for beauty in small things --those small pleasures that I always talk about. Thus my desire to hide withing myself and those I love. Thus my lack of desire for lots of material things, of triumph, of fame and fortune.

I reject the glory brought in by raw ambitions of that kind --and I relish --each day more and more- the simple things that bring me small moments of joy