Sometimes I go to bed with a pessimistic attitude. Then I wake up early in the morning and lie awake, and start the day with optimism. It is not about being, as Antonio Gramcsi asked, pessimist with intelligence and optimistic of will. At night, I am not wiser or more intelligent than I am during the day. I am, actually, more tired. Eduardo Galeano cleverly warned: “let pessimism for better times.” But if a group of good friends gather together some night, I do my best to be optimistic until the very end of the meeting. Yes, humanity is experiencing a crisis of senses (starvation, wars, blockades, selfishness, paths). We are not keen to remember suffering or deprivation for a long period of time, and things that make us feel anger or outrage, we just start to push them into the background if they become “regulars” in our mind. This way, the daily death of thousands of children, women, and elderly in Gaza starts to sound like “old” news, even though every day it occurs to other children, other women. Just horrible! Can´t humanity stop such a genocide? Can´t we, human beings, an allegedly superior specie, stop and condemn the perpetrator?

I am on the group of people who build hope, faith, will, senses, the same way Fidel asked to build rockfills: stone by stone, without looking nor measure the distance ahead. I follow the superb example of Martí: it is not about describing reality, of pointing out with a critical eye every obstacle, handicap, every moral depravity, as positivists and enemies did and still do. We have to build it, create it, take it for granted while we build it ceaselessly. We must push it to the best option because reality has a visible version, and other not visible at all, would-be as real as those we see. Our victory will have a cultural foundation, or it will not be. Human beings not only think as they live, they also live as they think: the relationship is not linear, nor is it built one-way. To jump over the impossible, we must trust the people.

The greatest Western power —so used to judge others, subjugate others, destroy those independent nations, all on behalf of freedom— splashes within a rough sea so the hegemony it once had for at least two centuries, cannot be sunk in its own waters. This power would drown us all so it can survive. It will provoke more wars —hard, “soft”, hybrids— coup d’etats, blockades, and once “naturalized,” they start to be become invisible. Two deteriorated men are running for the presidents of a decadent empire: one is a liar, swindler, with ambiguous symptoms of madness (never affecting his personal interests): the other is senile, incapable of following the thread of the script others write for him. But both will play to retake territories as ancient Emperors did. Trump, the likely winner, stated in a recent election rally in front of Cuban annexationists: “I did everything against Cuba, I promise. If elections had not been manipulated, in six months everything had been solved. They were to be erased. Then, Biden came.” Erased? The man saying he will save us from starvation is the one who provoke our starvation. The one who promise to wipe us from the map is the one saying he guarantees us freedom. We can perfectly be the Palestine of tomorrow. But it will not be that easy as Trump believes.

However, we could only defend ourselves, as we have defended ourselves against the other thirteen former U.S. presidents, including him, if we preserve the ideal of social justice that inspires and unites us. We must stop, ridicule, condemn the individual desire of selfish salvation some express, at the expense of everything and everyone. They are not saved that way either. Our society would lose its path, and its independence, if it only looked at itself, if it stopped believing in its strength, in its dreams, if it became pragmatic, if it weighed on a scale the advantages and disadvantages of internal or external solidarity, if I always give priority to economics before politics. I would care less about my entrepreneur neighbor's huge jeep —although it hurts that the surgeon, the teacher, the innovator in the factory or the field, walk on foot— if his project was linked to national production and contributed to Cuba’s growth, if he invests his dollars in the Homeland and not carry out his transactions abroad, if he pays all the taxes he owes to the State that covers everyone's needs, including his own. We cannot naturalize theft, even the one carried out indirectly, the one that is done by abandonment. We cannot naturalize poverty, because fighting against it, for real equality, which takes into account the differences (not the fictitious one of capitalism) is the foundation of Martí's and Fidel's national project. We cannot be Fidel, genius is not acquired at will; but we can be like him, like Che, and like Martí on the ethical level, which is what it means to be a follower of Fidel, Guevara, and Martí’s ideas. When someone says that it is no longer possible, because we are not Fidel, an excuse is made up.

Sometimes, at night, I am overwhelmed by the threats looming over Cuba and over Humanity. Saving the Cuban Revolution is saving the certainty that a better world is possible, is saving Humanity. As Martí stated in his fight against the Spanish empire and American imperialism: "He who rises with Cuba today will be rising for all time to come." But every morning I saddle my imaginary horse, and mount it, with mu lance ready. While I ride, I see women and men pass by, overcoming, like me, the blackouts, the endless hardship, the blockade, their own mistakes, ready to start a new day of dedication, of struggles, of solidarity. A Revolution like ours has enormous moral reserves and devoted leaders. We are not crazy people who confuse windmills with giants, but rather “sane crazy people” who discover the possible things that the impossible hides. I know we will win.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff