By Julio Suarez Ricardo*

HAVANA TIMES — I’ve been watching out for years to see if a good communist really exists, to whether they are essentially good or bad. It’s a very complicated subject.

I’ve been listening to their confessions while looking in their eyes for years, whether they have been drunk or sober. I was among their ranks for a long time; I’ve seen them in bad times and good times, which is if there have really been any good times.

A real Cuban communist will inform on you in the name of the Revolution, without feeling even a hint of shame. The majority of those who are already old today swear that they would even starve to death if it was for the Revolution.

My first memories go back to 1962 and I don’t remember malnourished people, people used to eat and dress well. These old people retire from their jobs but they never retire from monitoring others. Sitting in their wheelchairs in a 5th floor apartment in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood, they report everything they can see through their window, all they need is a telephone.

They don’t change their way of thinking, they want to die how they lived, like Silvio Rodriguez used to say, only Silvio lived the good life. Some of them continue to belong to the Cuban Communist Party and do all of this dirty and not very dignified work, enduring great hardship. They are a support mechanism for those who are living better off. They are the Party’s “idiot-activists”.

A real Cuban communist calls anybody who doesn’t think like they do a “worm”. They are convinced that whoever doesn’t think like them is a worm, which isn’t a humain being, and therefore, they feel no remorse in reporting on them, abusing them, hitting them if necessary, locking them up. And then they confirm 100% that the government doesn’t violate human rights in Cuba. It must be because they are talking about worms and not human beings…

A real Cuban communist puts ideology before his/her own family. You can lie in the name of the Revolution, and it isn’t a sin.

A real Cuban communist lives and repeats that they are a fighter, even though they have never fought, and that’s why 60 years after a scuffle, and forty years after a trip to Africa, there are more fighters here in Cuba than there were in Vietnam.

A real Cuban communist generally wears capitalist clothes and shoes and uses capitalist technology, and if you go to visit a capitalist country, come back with a load of secondhand goods while saying that capitalism doesn’t work.

A real Cuban communist can see that the Russians are invading and killing and condem the US when they partake in the same activities.

A real Communist swears that Cuba is the best country in the world to live, even though they have never visited any other country.

An authentic Cuban communist swears that somebody who doesn’t think like them, even though they were born and raised on the island, isn’t Cuban. And when somebody criticizes their Revolution, they just make an ugly face and say “I won’t allow you” to talk to me like that. They hold a monopoly of power on minds, thoughts and ideas.

A real Cuban communist suffers for their neighbor’s wellbeing, thinking about all those who live in poverty. They hate the rich, yet they would be rich if they could.

A real Cuban communist can only be so on three grounds: a lack of information, nonsense and convenience.

A real Cuban communist keeps 99 of their fellow countrymen at bay: with support from the army, the police, State security and all kinds of paramilitary forces.

A real Cuban communist doesn’t believe in religion. If they do come to joining some kind of religion, they aren’t communist or religious at the end of the day, much less Christian, because communists are cruel to their enemies, nothing to do with the iAmad to your own true enemies of the Gospel.

The old authentic Cuban communist instilled fear and apathy into the fate of the country and its subsequent generations.

When they hear an uncomfortable truth, the real Cuban communist attacks whoever said it, discrediting them as criminals or gay, or mercenaries, even claiming that when they were at primary school, they used to eat their classmates’ snacks.

Those real Cuban communists are the ones responsible for the downfall of successive generations. “It isn’t the new generation that is being degenerated; if it becomes corrupt, it’s because those mature men were already corrupt,” Montesquieue once said in El Espiritu de las Leyes.

If somebody feels uncomfortable by what is written here because they believe they are a real Cuban communist and that they don’t behave like what I’ve described here, don’t worry: you aren’t.

*Guest writer for Havana Times