By Jose Leandro Garbey (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – I have never liked uniforms; they never suited me. Twice I was close to becoming a repressor. Both times I was in uniform. I didn’t want to be there, but I was. If I had received the order, perhaps today, I would be a repressor.
*****
A crowd surrounds the metal gate that leads to the house of Rogelio Tabio Lopez, a man I don’t know, but hate. It is October 2010. Inside the house located at Carlos Manuel and 6th Street North, in Guantanamo, a dozen members of the Movement of Resistance and Democracy are under siege by State Security, the police, and hundreds of civilians who, like me, have been mobilized from various schools and workplaces to be used by the regime to mask the repression.
Pedestrian traffic is interrupted at the corners. A patrol. Motorized officers. Plainclothes agents loitering around the house. A few meters away, dozens of uniforms from junior high and high school stand out; minors who, without any explanations, were brought to that place. Turned by our teachers into passive protagonists of a hate rally.
A woman observes through a small gap in a window. She seems scared, under the pressure of a mob shouting slogans and insults as if they were bitter enemies separated by the most piercing betrayal.
Perhaps, years ago, she was the doctor who attended the birth of the child who now labels her a worm. Perhaps she was another single mother who has raised her children alone and abandoned to fate, without government help, and days before argued with a bureaucrat in an office to which one of her tormentors went in a desperate attempt to solve her housing problem. Perhaps she was the teacher who, before being expelled from her workplace, taught about Martí to the young woman who in a couple of hours will see her father hoarse, lying on the couch, after venting his anger in a hate rally.
Maybe among those present is a friend of her family; there may even be an unknown relative of the woman protecting herself behind an oxidized gate covered with anti-government phrases.
Reproducing the regime’s symbolic violence is common in Cuba, even involuntarily. In popular slang, there is little difference between a dissident and a worm. These are the consequences of the totalitarian dehumanization process and, in the case of a repressor, serve as a tool to normalize indifference to injustice. You can beat someone without a name. It is possible to crush a worm because of its repugnant appearance. You can lead a hate rally because the mercenary deserves it and it won’t be the last one they will endure. With the club about to strike someone else’s body, you don’t think that the victim could be a possible teacher, mother, doctor, friend, or relative. It is an order given… and executed. Job done.
I retain some memories of the events intact. Until recently, I tried to blame the innocence of someone who, being a teenager, considered them insignificant and assumed that time would erase the memory. Something not significant for someone who didn’t hit, didn’t carry signs, didn’t shout slogans… but was there. Not c