SOCIETY

For a few years now, he has been rolling down a sentence for cyberspace that Umberto Eco stated in an interview and returned to on some occasion or another. The text crudely stated that social media had managed to give the idiots a voice and that we were suffering from the invasion of a legion of. In fact, in the face of many current events, the writer’s words need to be reviewed.

For weeks, Dr. Benito Abeledo Fernández, who works in the mental health department of San Miguel del Padrón, in La Hababa, has waited in vain for the barrage of patients with psychiatric alterations according to the exceptional state of things that the world lives and in particular the country. But the alud didn’t just arrive. Are we survivors? How long will the survival catch up with us? As a doctor, he says, he has no scientific explanation for it.

For those who serve the Church since communication, this stage of confinement has not allowed her to stop. María C. López Campistrous (our Chuchu) knows it well. In this time, in addition to the concerns accumulated by the children and relatives far from it, he achieved the complete digitization of the 216 editions of the diocesan newsletter of Santiago de Cuba “Church in March”, which in the midst of the pandemic and isolation reached its thirty years of uninterrupted circulation. It was many hours of work, but of great joy, because this publication has been linked to his life and service these thirty years.

The days of confinement led a woman, mother, wife, poet and novelist to create with their hands a Tree of Life to celebrate, in the midst of chaos, an action of worship of the created by God. When Yasmín Sierra Montes felt anguish, he would go to his tree and place something created by God and say, “If God created this world he will never destroy it. I must put your work on hold.”

On this occasion, the text of the series that we have published for a few days, at the request of our protagonist, presents it as an interview. A Cuban responds, from head to toe; a Catholic, the same, from the beginning and until it ends; proud of his land and his ecclesial community in that archdiocese. His greatest fortune on earth is the large family he has constituted, the parents he had… For five years now, this Cuban Catholic has emigrated to the United States. At this stage of pandemic, Osvaldo Gallardo González has understood as never before his own fragility and that of others. However, when he has reached the top of bewilderment, he has found God and the certainty of his will.

Recent times have uncovered the exercise of opinion, especially on social media. And there’s everything, like in apothecary. For example, when a Cuban issue is addressed, especially when critical points are made, some react with the old and useless dogma that the critic is an enemy, a mercenary. Some come to the terrible proposal that “should go away”, as if the simple geographical terrain where we live, is a kind of club exclusive to a card, a party or a political trend. Nothing makes us more human than the diversity of expressions, tastes, ideas and views. But respect for the other, the ability to hear and learn from the opinion of others, even those we do not share, makes us wiser.

Upon the arrival of the Covid-19 in Cuba and the obligatory social isolation, Orlando Fernández Guerra, permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Havana, found on social media the ideal space to continue sharing Scripture. It was then that he decided to create on WhatsApp the group “Friends of the Bible”, a space that brings together many Lay Catholics, evangelical faithful and pastors from different congregations, including agnostics interested in a spiritual message and Hope for these times.

Cuban narrator Lázaro Zamora gets up every day thinking about when he will start giving up the pandemic, whether he will ever disappear. So far he has not been able to find answers; neither do scientists. Still, he says, “I want to be optimistic, to think that finally this nightmare will pass and life will be back to the way it was.”

It is not easy to fight that of journalism in the face of the rise or bombardment of information that only appeals to emotions and not to the enumeration of evidence, arguments or concrete facts on the subject they refer to. Today, when anyone communicates anything, there are many journalists who continue to bet on being more serious, more rigorous, more accurate… to prevent such a vapulous profession from going through the swallow.

The poet, narrator and Camagueyan essayist, Carlos Esquivel, although he claims that not all stories have a terrible ending, this one, which does not end yet, has shallow stretches. In the midst of this pandemic, he says, “We are actors, of which no one recognizes.”