The Vertiginous Days of Anger

Havana/Recently, many calculations have been made about the time that has transpired since Cuba and the United States broke diplomatic relations. The journalists’ texts have emulated each other in the search for an exact number of years, weeks and days since January 3, 1961. However, so far none have alluded to the 734 days that transpired before the two countries parted ways.

Now that the emphasis is too frequently on how slow, complex and difficult the normalization process between the two nations will be, one has the right to wonder what would have happened if, between the first day of January 1959 and the third day of 1961, the principals implicated in this history had been animated by the same spirit that now measures each step with serenity, without haste but without pause, and takes it all gradually.

It is too difficult to resist the temptation to calculate at what speed normalization could occur if, in the next 734 days, the initiatives on one side or the other had the vertigo that existed then.

If harmony could be supplied with the same fuel on which the anger of those days gorged, one might venture the date of July 23, 2017 (just when the elections are being organized that will conclude with a new government in 2018) to take stock of what has been advanced.

Timelines are boring, almost no one reads them fully. The one I’ve suggested here includes some facts that more intensely marked the course of events. Only official Cuban sources have been used, and are certainly missing documents, speeches, declarations, and above all, actions, many of them to be declassified.