Infinite austerity

Notice that this picture has a divergent plot to the biblical passage. Under an atmosphere of sarcasm, each outfit, together with the background patched in harlequin motifs, evidences a conceptual game. There is a hint of mockery at first sight, but we quickly become a prisoner of empathetic humanity. We have no reason to hate the messenger; we reconcile with the artist, because we are here in front of a complaint. This portrait of a group of three people, cropped close-up,  with stamped document  in the center: it’s a critique.  These witnesses  invited us to a trial of absent accused. Remember the quote of Félix Varela (the one who taught Cubans to thinking) in his letters to Elpidio said: The fury of the wicked does not calm down except with the destruction of people under the pretext that it is impossible to reform them. This work is a claim againg of impiety, superstition, and fanaticism, like the prophetic letter from the wise priest as well. The painting is a struggle between discontent and filial love. Another family lying on a closed curtain of cuban gig. Other brothers who float over the rumbles of rhombus and rumba. This is an embrace againg the wicked serfhood of the   jester’s army who don’t hide their insatiable  gluttony.

The tragedy that never ends. The painting on its execution remains in the grisaille. In the skins of white rice and black beans. They do not have the face of the dead, but the surely bodies of ghosts. Naked and incomplete bodies. Perhaps they will be the spirits of the victims of some balcony or citizens who went to be baptized in the gulf looking for promised lands. Perhaps, as in a memory, when we are half alive, we are half dead. If we look closely at the painting, we can see the symbolic charge of each character in his costume. A beautiful girl in a Peter Pan hat, in some naïve elf dream of Neverland, gives us hope. A careful wife, an empress with her native warrior plume, a masked superhero with her power to put joy over adversity, gives us confidence. While the gentleman in her hat tries to get away from his fears with clever camouflage, he survives. Reveals himself, as a Guerrilla-Charlot, a critic of capital and an armed defender of the oppressed; in agony he waits uncertainty of him. Sad.  Do they expect redemption or a final judgment? Maybe the unforgiveness come from the social pact with the Mephistopheles of mass? Who knows? It is just an old pact. Only freedom exchanged for the blackmail of the subsidy, the lamb once a year for the crumbs and the lines; they switch democracy by rationalization. The transaction wasn’t a big deal, that’s why they wait and pray, for recent changes for new contracts and fewer idylls.

In this portrait, we appreciate a pertinent dialogue with that philosophical manual from the mid-nineteenth century: The Holy Family: A critique of critique-critique where its authors, the fathers of communism, through their positions of scientific socialism, their dialectical materialism, question the publications of some brothers,  orthodox hegelians, who receive responses for an article where they attempt a reform of Christianity and of the german family of that epoch. The refutation, the book in question, is lengthy and peppered with comedy and biting humor. Which is a constant polemic against the speculative idealism of the Bauer’s brothers. Comrades Karly and Frederic consider the thoughts of their opponents, caricatured and isolated from the suffering of the masses, since they ignore their human passions and also calling them as non-critical and profane masses. The authors brand these critics as false prophets, mere puritans who safeguard hypocrisy and disguise the decadence of the bourgeois class. This book, The Holy Family by Marx and Engels, is foundational to the ideology of communism. They preached an uprising against religion, family, property, and institutions throughout the whole text.                                       

  For the creators of communism, the world is nothing but the reflection of our own activity. That’s why the book is full of examples that point to the contradictions between property and poverty. Contrasts of marriages in different classes of families. His main ideas argue as the human being is whose produces his own history and the history of all societies up to the present day is the history of the class struggle. In the opinion of the creators of communism, the family is the place where the oppression of women by men is perpetual and where gender inequality and economic dependence on the oppressive man are endless. Bourgeois families reproduce and perpetuate capitalist production relations and are the graveyard of individual relations. Regarding religion, these philosophers in other works say, it is a way in which the oppressed and the exploited justify and accept their situation in society. It only serves as a comfort and distraction to people who are suffering, which is why they clung to it, always looking for escape and hope like an addiction instead of rebelling. While the oppressors control them and justifying their exploitation and power through it. Similar, let me add, to a single-party misrule without opposition.

Going back to our time and avoiding this debate from the past, it is good to remember that every utopia is an incipient dystopia. This family pictured here are also victims, but from a different era. In many places, the intellectual proletariat became the vanguard of entire societies. That class is no longer left behind and commands an equal fate for the once oppressed, while everything is a common property like air. Now lay people without castes. They gave up everything. The land, the harvest, salaries, even heritage and descendants they ceded everything. What is family if they gave up the future of the town? The communists keep killed any possibility of revolt against the state. The same one that owed its cohesion to social life, abolished the impartiality of the rule of law, does not allow people to live with dignity and warrant cohesion with repression. Where they send the critics, seem that nobody knows. Sometimes knowing is not healthy. The fathers of scientific socialism do not imagine how their disciples practice the censorship that exiles, imprisons, and shoots. Well, there can be no censorship where there is only consensus. Communist pioneers should see the new Revolutionary Family Code as less tribal and more tropical. A legal norm full of humanity that fights exclusion. A new chapter of the social contract where affective relationships are safe by the government.

These new revolutionary commandments, in summary not less importance, results from the popular consultation: Surrogacy is legal now, which supposes a future solitary gestation based on internationalist character and tips. The lax obligation of the social security to pay dignified pensions by state authorities, since all kin are responsible by law for their relatives’ families too. Parents must denounce their children, preventing them from falling into the habit of criticism. Also, ensuring that they take part in the school indoctrination, of course, for not to face consequences. Parents with undesirable political views may lose the privilege of parenting. This advanced code, it could add, does not stimulate the improvement of critical social indices because those statistics simply do not exist. How many massive benefits? Now everything is going to be alright. The list of rations will increase until blow up and disappears. The crisis will stop. No more inflamed economic. Those who couldn’t vote because they weren’t present at that moment on the island, will have their chance one day. The virtuous organizers of this legislation never give up. The oxen that march two by two, not even miseries, could break them.