Living as You Live: Anecdotes About Che

By Lien Estrada

HAVANA TIMES – I am afraid of becoming the very thing I criticize so much. For example, becoming like the Communist Party of Cuba, which subjects you to the harshest punishments if you do not agree with it completely and unconditionally. For this reason, from time to time I allow myself to read, converse, and take in information that does not necessarily align with my religious, political, or social views.

In that vein,  I decided to read Living as You Live: Anecdotes About Che, compiled by Mayra Mendoza Gil. On page 13, I came across one of the experiences that most caught my attention: a conversation between Che and a friend. The friend tells Che how good it would be to “create a workplace in the Andes… carry out a revolution… agrarian reform and educational reform.” Che then responds with a question: “Carry out a revolution without firing a shot?”

Finishing Che’s question and thinking about Cuba and a possible war to bring one cycle to an end and begin another (which we can only hope would be better) were almost one and the same thought for me. But then my pacifist upbringing awakens, rooted in Christianity, particularly the Quaker tradition, which upholds nonviolence at all costs. Violence is unacceptable under any circumstances.

But I also ask myself: What happens when you experience an ever-growing sense of helplessness in the face of a system that claims to be the fairest of all those in existence, yet every day you discover that it works only for a privileged few? When you realize that state representatives, in public meetings, tell you to raise your concerns and pass them up the chain of command so they can be resolved, but all they are really doing is creating a veil of illusion that allows you to sleep that night, make it through the next day, and, with enormous sacrifice, endure many more days, even decades, without any of those problems being solved? Instead, they have only grown worse…

You then find yourself forced to engage in dialogue with people who understand no language other than that of power, and you feel that they hold almost absolute power in this country. Everything is manipulation, and mistreatment is a constant presence in hospitals, banks, workplaces, schools… And human life, like that of any other living being, is not eternal. So the question, “Will we have to resort to gunfire in the end?” no longer seems so far-fetched.

I remember an occasion when the Spanish feminist philosopher Amelia Valcarcel said that when you presented arguments defending your rights, but people demanded more arguments to prove that they really were your rights, and you provided them, and they demanded still more arguments, eventually what you needed to do was ask for a baseball bat.

That comment, which may sound quite funny and which she made in reference to women’s struggle against the patriarchal system, also led me to seriously question how far dialogue, flexibility, and understanding can take us… and when they are simply not the way forward. Just as Che responded to his friend, I find myself wondering the same thing from my own civilian naivety.

Nevertheless, I would never allow myself to encourage an armed conflict in my country in any way. That is not my way of thinking, even though I have been ruled politically by military men my entire life. And although I have asked myself millions of times, without finding answers, how can we overcome this collective tragedy we are experiencing as a people, I would never wish to choose war of any kind.

But I acknowledge my gratitude to life for allowing me to confront other ways of resolving conflicts and to question my own. How far can my approaches take us? And where do they cease to be effective?

Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here on Havana Times.