Dissident priest dares to post a stirring condemnation of Cuba’s dictatorship

From our Bureau of Troublesome Priests

Father Alberto Reyes has posted yet another essay in which he rails against the so-called “Revolution,” writing as if he were the entire Cuban nation. If you are a praying person, please pray for Father Reyes. He is skating on extremely thin ice. This was emailed to me without a link. Loosely translated below. The professor says: this is REQUIRED READING.

I have been thinking about questions I would ask as a nation:

What more do you want from me, Cuban Revolution? You seduced me many years ago, hypnotized me with lies, blinded me with dreams of joy, promises of freedom and justice. And I believed you, I surrendered to you, and I gave you everything: youth, efforts, sacrifices, even my family, my children.

But you were just lying, and while you smiled at me and encouraged me with words of progress, you slowly stripped me of everything, leaving me in the shameful nakedness of my broken present: a life in lies.

You broke my wings, kidnapped my dreams, dimmed my gaze, condemned my future, silenced my grievances. You distanced me from God and dried up my soul, and fueled by speeches of apparent altruism, you urged me towards violence, exclusion, and disdain: a life in hatred.

But I started waking up, amidst a thousand resistances, surrounded by fears, haunted by the inevitable awareness of my defenselessness, and protected as much as possible by deceit, by compliant simulation, by the internalized spirit of self-imposed slavery: a life of masks.

And now what, what more do you want from me? What more when I have nothing left to offer but fragments of a life that is not life?

I live among ruins, filth, and misery, burdened by scarce food and health irreversibly breaking down. I am encircled by uncertainty, loneliness filled with memories of those who departed, and fear, the fear of dying in chains and the fear of rising and breaking them; the fear, which you so skillfully wove into my soul, through violence, prisons, beatings, complicit informants who also live in fear.

What more do you want from me, Cuban Revolution? Now that no one believes in your speeches anymore, now that no one desires or loves you anymore, now when you walk the streets and you too are afraid because you have not left a single honest ally, and you know you can no longer trust anyone because you taught us so well to hide the truth with complicit gestures, that now even you are unable to recognize what lies behind a smile, behind a pledge of loyalty.

What more do you want from me, Cuban Revolution? How much more are you going to tear from me, to lead a life that is also not life, because you too live in suspicion, in alertness, in calculation, in constant need for punishment? And that, that is anything but life.

I don’t know what more you could want from me, but I do know what I want for myself: I want my dreams, I want the sparkle in my eyes, I want my confiscated wings, I want to be able to decide in my present and choose the paths of the future. I want your chains off my body and soul. And I want to embrace the God you stole from me, the only one who can make me capable, in freedom and in bidding you farewell, of forgiving you.