Freedom cries out, because extremes meet

On May 28 I spent a couple of hours at the Book Fair signing copies from my recent research The meeting of four empires. The management of Spaniards, Aztecs, Incas and Mayans (Kolyma). The most important thing about that day was that I became once again and with pleasure the opening act for my son Enriquewho that same day signed his first book: manipulated trajectory (The Fog Club). He was accompanied by the co-author of that opera prima, classmate and good friend Javier Chaquet Rivero. One of the best news is that they They endorsed twice as many copies as I did of mine. To the point that they have become the authors who have sold the most on their label during those days. Many buyers had come on purpose, but countless spontaneous people stopped to chat with the youngest writers of the Madrid Book Fair in 2022.

Nowadays, my son and his friend are designing their next project, because they are fully aware that a stork does not make spring. Phrase, by the way, used by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics (LID) 2300 years ago to express precisely that consolidating habits requires effort. The important thing is not to arrive, but to stay.

That weekend and the following one I went with my children to the fair in my neighborhood. In this case, not dedicated to books, but to those pleasant entertainments consisting of throwing darts at balloons or shooting with carbines or compressed air pistols to collapse boats with the desire to return home with a trifle. Well smoked at all times by black pudding, chorizo, hamburgers or squid waiting over the fire to be breaded.

In a booth I spun a thread with a merry and age-matched pitchman. While my children enjoyed popping balloons and gloating over the selection of rewards, Ricardo Perez -that was my interlocutor’s name- he explained to me that had recently arrived in Spain from Cuba. On the Caribbean island he was a doctor. After years of enduring the prison conditions imposed for decades by the Castro brothers, he had chosen to risk everything on a letter in search of freedom.

–You don’t know what you have, he enlightened me. Since the revolution, Cuba continues to be a huge penitentiary where we galley slaves are the citizens. Those who promised freedom from the previous dictatorship mutated into heinous persecutors of anyone who does not pay homage to their cruel whims. And to think that some in other countries support those who seek to establish an atrociously inhumane system like the one we have been suffering from for so many years!

She stopped to discreetly wipe away the tears that were rolling down her cheeks. She took out of a pocket the photograph of two sprouts:

-Look, I have escaped with the desire to also bring my children and grandchildren, because I do not want them to grow up in the unbreathable habitat imposed by some communist filibusters.

Continuous:

–I hope someone can help me and my wife. She has a degree in business sciences and I -he reiterated- a doctor with extensive experience.

Listening to his heartbreaking cries, it came to my mind a book by the only Chinese Nobel laureate in literature. Gao Xingjian, in The book of a lonely manbeyond his crude genital obsession, narrates experiences similar to those quickly enunciated by Ricardo, both migrants in search of a better destiny.

It is astonishing that the innumerable warnings from those who have suffered Marxist dictatorships continue to preach in the desert. Should be required reading, among other content, Alexander Berkman’s autobiography, The Bolshevik Myth; Memoirs, by Arthur Koestler; Against all hope, by Armando Valladares; The Wind Blows Again, by Vladimir Bukovsky; Wild Swans, by Jung Chang… These and hundreds more describe in detail and in the first person the madness generated by those who deprive freedom in exchange for alleged egalitarianism.

Also essential is the work Jean-François Revel, Useless Knowledge. This author, half journalist, half thinker, has served to conceptually distance more than one from those piranhas of foreign goods that, under franchises that barely hide unhealthy greed and rancor, try to re-erect gulags or re-education camps, like Stalin, to Pol Pot or Mao liked to call their collective cages slaughterhouses for human creatures.

freedom cries so that we continue defending it from predators of dissimilar colors, because extremes meet.

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