My Puchita:

My birthday will be on the 9th. I will not be able to enjoy your company, and Gabriel, who already misses me, will not be able to wake me up, with his eyes beaming for joy, to remind me that I'm getting older. When will we be able to enjoy these basic pleasures that we were used to, and which have been denied to us by the injustice and ferocity of a deadly regime? To this question, I cannot but answer the same way I always answer those who ask me when this hateful regime will be over: This will end when Cubans wish it. If we suffer under a tyranny, it's only because we put up with it, and so we deserve it. Until the Cuban people, in spite of the government's repression, decide to be free, we will continue to be slaves. As long as we continue believing the regime's barrage of propaganda, we will continue, like mesmerized toads, living in the muck.

Castro's Revolution has been, since the beginning, an Edenic simulation that, through a press that indoctrinates more than it informs, has sold a messianic image, has tried to dazzle the world, has bamboozled some, and has fooled a whole people. Of paradise, Cuba has only had the perilous passage, a danger-strewn Styx, that daring navigators have desperately discovered in the Straits of Florida, in which they envision the promise of a better life after having faced Cerberus.

This year, in which I arrive at age 52, without peace, without a country and without liberty, has been particularly fateful for Cuba. Thousands pay with their imprisonment the quota of suffering that periodically punishes the nation. Faced with the impossibility of lowering social pressures through another massive exodus, the regime has been forced to substitute imprisonment for migration.

Police operations, this time headed by State Security, have been able to put the brakes on popular discontent. How many prisoners were arrested this year? No one, except the higher-ups in power, knows. Operatives with highfalutin names, such as People's Shield, directed against drug trafficking; Offensive Two, against opponents and journalists, and others, have landed many in Cuban jails. But popular discontent has not decreased. Unconformity bubbles in our country as the lava inside a volcano. I sincerely believe that the increasing disapproval to the Castroite system is irreversible. I aspire to no more birthdays under the heavy burden of Cuban totalitarianism.