The (radiant) future of the Homeland

When I was a little kid, they announced the radiant future of the Homeland. I used to imagine it, by the time I was very young, with twinkling lights, phosphorescent streamers, fireworks. Later on, I dreamt that what they were announcing like the radiant future of the Homeland could be a sort of clean country like those you see in a movie, or this country where I live in now, without cracked walls, without stony, dusty streets, without people with faces disturbed by hopelessness. I used to imagine it really glowing, almost a blinding light. But I was growing up and my parents were getting old gradually and the so-announced future didn´t arrive, and I was pretty sure that it was going to surprise us one day we were always ready for. That certainty was turning into a vague hope and later into the cruel uncertainty. There were always people who never believed in a future and least luminous. They were called sceptical, faithless men. Afterwards, those men disappeared and inhabit now in cities more or less bright. About a year ago I left Cuba and I still believed, naively, that one day the future would come and I was not going to witness it. There were even friends who confirmed it: the radiant future of the Homeland was already near and I would be too far. I was accused many times for being pessimistic: I could only see the dark side, the rotten part of everything, and for men like me the future of the Homeland was taking so long to shine once and for all. Before coming to Canada, the Island was slashed by one of the worst hurricanes in our hurricane-like history, just when it was expected at least a spark of that longed future. I heard people say that God had abandoned us in the middle of the sea and others that not even Nature (the god of atheists) was with us. I was already living here when the blackouts returned, and that confirmed, once again, my suspicions. The dreamt advent is still a chimera. The ration card may fade and those things supposed to be government kindnesses (the essence of all those years of resistance) are now aimed against the people: is the people´s fault having got used to those free things, it´s their fault having sucked the kind breast of the Motherland and it´s the people´s fault that now she is like that, starving and with bags under her eyes. I always heard that the future of the Homeland would never come, but as innocence is not a capital sin, I was always holding the innocent hope that, suddenly, the heavens and seas would open and there would be light all over the Island. Ah, the future... I still close my eyes and I can almost smell it, touch it, taste it.