Slaves are no longer considered “lower sort of men” whom nature wanted to distinguish from freemen, who are “useful for political life in the arts both of war and peace,” as Aristotle said. The lives of slaves are no longer sacrificed to calm the anger of the gods, to celebrate the accession of a new ruler or to appease the audience in the arena. They are no longer used as workforce to boost the economy of a country.
Although it’s been long since our morals and manners put an end to outright slavery, millions of slaves still breathe and work under the yoke of tyrants who have found a new means of control – unanimity, which they use to tie them and lock them up and deprive them of the right that makes the man truly free: the right to disagree.
After the triumph of the Revolution, our ancestors erred by being naive. They let themselves be fooled by the new ideology of unanimity in its extreme form. It’s the unanimity that has left us a legacy of there being people subject to the will of others, with no right to dissent, differ, decide or protest.
This unanimity has forced us to swear a daily oath that we want to be like Che, instead of letting us worship other heroes such as Elpidio Valdés, Batman, Superman or any other personage of our choice. It has made us greet each other with the hand on the forehead, worshiping the name of a monster – a foreign butcher, admirer of execution walls, without actually knowing why we were doing this.
We have been left with a legacy of a suicidal programme of “socialism or death” – a legacy of the contempt for the Divine and idolatry. We have been made to worship an omnipotent leader whose name was Fidel, now it’s Raúl and tomorrow, who knows. We have learned to be afraid to talk about anything else than socialism and to see Lucifer in the faces of priests and the Messiah in the faces of the tyrants.
We have inherited revulsion for private property, aversion to the bourgeois and hatred for “traitors”. For this reason we have never been able to make business or gain property and, as a consequence, we have nothing to leave to our children. Further, unanimity explains why we threw stones and eggs at the dregs of Mariel and committed acts of repudiation to dishonour our fellows who dared to show their disagreement with the regime.
We have learned to always raise our hands without thinking, just to please our master, even if we felt a noose was tickling our neck. We have been rewarded by a system of rules, regulations and draconian rules that make us shiver.
Unanimity has left behind a legacy of Greek slaves – helots. We have no right to protest in our squares or streets. We have no right to dissent, to criticize or even caricature. We have been enslaved.
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