El Futuro

Questioning the ambiguities of post-socialist transition through the Cubans' endemic inability to imagine the future.

The work is an attempt to understand the dizzyingly disorienting social environment of the island and it’s mainly focused on the people’s inability to formulate sustainable life prospects.

They’re quietly dying. I was compelled to show this reality. In numerous conversations with the Cubans, I have heard people, even teens, talking in the past tense: expressions like "I would have liked..." ; 'I would have liked to' ; 'it would have been nice' were present in any conversation: an individual's life, understood as an amalgam of aspirations and goals, lived with the resignation of a dream destined to remain only a dream.

The western stereotype of a country still outside the dynamics of late capitalism whose inhabitants live happily with little, still in force in Europe and deliberately conveyed by the Cuban government, has proved to be unfounded, to say the least.

Today, life on the island is really hard; it is currently very difficult to obtain basic necessities,food,  medicines, even drinking water. The Covid-19 pandemic has isolated Cuba and blocked tourism, the country's most important source of income. Despite the world expecting a positive development in the country after relations with the US opened up; Joe Biden has not changed US policy towards Cuba.

Thus the US embargo continues to bring chronic shortages of basic necessities while a feeling of deep pessimism pervades the entire society already crushed by the grip of the pandemic.The Castro brothers are no longer in power and the new generation of Cubans born after the end of the Soviet Union, about a third of the population, are less ideological than their predecessors and want to live, travel and express themselves freely. Many now also have the means to know, thanks to the Internet, what they are missing. 

Faced with this generational change, the Cuban government wields power in an existential limbo and tries to fill the void by urging its citizens to be patriots through propaganda as ubiquitous as it is anachronistic. Accustomed to political repression for several generations, Cubans who choose not to emigrate, or those who are truly unable to do so, are dying in silence, almost passively accepting this scenario without resorting to violence.

In fact, despite the apparent carefree of the peacefull Caribbean scenery, the essence of Cuba has always resided in its people with their magnetic charisma and formidable resilience, but this is inexorably depleting and it is impossible to predict what will happen if it does.