Pardo Lazo
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, Translator: Unstated
They often made and received calls using their cell phones
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Finally the miracle had happened. The prose of war of decades and
decades of totalitarianism media emerges now from the mouth of the
Catholic Church, formerly irreconcilable enemy of Godless societies.
The press release from Orlando Marquez, director of the Archdiocese of
Havana's magazine Palabra Nueva — New Word — requested by Granma, the
official organ of the Cuban Communist Party, is the suicide of an illusion.
Without making it to the first page, but with the consent of Cardinal
Jaime Ortega and the imprimatur of General Raul Castro Ruz, the Cuban
chapter of the "Reconciliation" just became obsolete (even while still
in the making).
Author of a thousand and one democraticforms columns, Orlando Márquez,
not without humiliating dignity, has paid the price of informing us that
their will be no such thing. At least not among men and women now
living. Resentment rather than reconciliation: in this, too, were they
wise, our warlords as a fount of olive-green governance.
It's upsetting (and panic inducing), this eccentric ecclesiastic before
a domestic question of human rights, in a nation that limps with respect
to the constitutional text itself. They marvel (and mutilate) the
threats of a police intervention that would devastate the "religious
freedom" of Cubans (the just will fall for the sinners: it's the
exemplary dogma of the Revolutionary State). It's laughable (and rabid)
the prudish paranoia of seeing themselves as victims of an anti-papal
plot. It's miserable (and mediocre) this matrimony of an institution of
the spirit on the most materialist — militaristic? — altar of the world.
Cuba is a very convenient scaffold. Control is Catholicism. But Orlando
Marquez legitimates and, without knowing it, stones his Church. With
this coupling of fidelities, the prominence stolen in recent years by
the Catholic hierarchy begins to fade. The first words to come from God
in our official press are already a capitulation, more artful than
atheist. Showing their dictatextual accomplices seams. Religion reduced
to group therapy to cover "spiritual and even material needs." The
temple, like the whole street, seems to belong to no one, for that
native sin of not being sufficiently pious (although the interventions
of State Security are themselves hermeneutically justified as political
performance or collateral damage).
Applauding we are overwhelmingly a people. But at the first personal
gesture we disappear. Or they disappear us. And then we are no longer
strangers in the land of others. Worse still, we are the Other known and
unrecognizable: unpardonable pariahs under the crushing demagoguery of
power (which always is One and does not admit the Outside).
Hence, perhaps, the barbarity of the ballet of announcement-repression
between Catholics and Communists. Hence also the incriminating loathing
that in symbiosis launches Granma and Palabra Nueva against some
occupants capable of "frequently making and receiving calls using their
cell phones." In some unlikely bit of that future signal the humanist
heresy of our freedom could be incubating today.
From post-Communism to post-Catholicism there is only a single text
message of difference.
March 16 2012
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment