Reacciones, a represión en Irán, al ¿por qué no te callas?

Press review:
Alamar
author: Maciej Stasi짚ski (Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland)

"Everything within the Revolution, outside the Revolution - nothing" - for over fifty years Fidel Castro has been emotionally blackmailing his subjects, allowing them to act, think and exist only if they adore and support him. The Cubans, who have succumbed to him, take  humiliation, poverty, violence, and the official lies of the propaganda with humbleness. Those who do not want to be under his reign and are against him, either go to prison or flee across the sea.

The movie Alamar Express shows young Cubans, who do not care about this slogan in the least, they are above it, outside it, beside it. Before it and after it. When the slogan is presented in the movie, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Revolution and the dictator's 80th birthday, the main characters - Omni - are taking care of their daily business, in the most normal and natural manner. And this is not in any way reminiscent of the daily battle to make ends meet, tormented by the hustle of material existence, in a country overwhelmed by the lack of literally everything.

On the contrary, these Cubans want to live and live life to the fullest, by totally ignoring the ideological vice of the propaganda and the watchful eye of the secret police. They live with the backs turned to the official reality, but face to face in their own surroundings. They do their own thing. They recognize and express their human needs and the needs of their neighbours from the Alamar housing estate near Havana. In this Orwellian totalitarian utopia, they mutually see each other as neighbours, human beings, kin, without the mediation of the State and its Authorities. They sculpt, paint, write, recite poems, compose and sing songs, the paste texts in buses, hang pictures on the walls of the apartment buildings, organize happenings and events, record video movies, place old sofas and armchairs at bus stops, so that people will not have to wait for hours for the bus in the scorching heat. They don't ask anyone for permission, especially the authorities.

Their success is great. The neighbours ask for and urge the painter, so that the pictures she paints could hang on their floors as quickly as possible, since the pictures change the grey reality that surrounds them. The alarmed authorities quickly place benches at the bus stops, so it doesn't turnout that the subjects themselves can look after their needs better than Big Brother Leviathan.

They pose a problem to the dictatorship, as the Omni in Alamar do not deal with politics. Nevertheless the government sees them as a threat, and rightfully so. Because in the anthropological scrap yard Cuba has become as a result of the communist dictatorship, the Omni are collecting the rubble of their and their loved ones' humanity to bring them back to a oneness and they try to talk to each other about the meaning of life, not asking anyone but themselves about their opinions. In this sense, even though there is no penal figure to persecute them, they express of the deepest, the most fundamental opposition of a sovereign human being against Those Who Think for Us and a challenge to Those Who Know Better How We Should Live Than We Do. They are proof that Life and a Person are stronger than the System and the Ideology. They are the hope for the rebirth of Cuba.

Polish bard Jacek Kaczmarski sang about a hopeless Poland 20 years ago:

The sky is almost invisible; the gulf is cold and dark,
Let an avalanche of rocks fall,
And let the merciless gorge walls come together,
Because what bores the shape of future spaces
Like an underground river
It will erode caverns in the rocks
It will uncover a gold vein
Because the source
Because the source
Is still alive".
Patrycja Satora showed the world the other, the real Cuba, today an underground but tomorrow a normal one.