Those who don’t show their faces

The film “The Lives of the Others,” which will be shown on December 8th at the Acapulco Cinema, will put before the Cuban public scenes more than well known. The sample of German cinema, organized into the Festival of the New Latin-American Cinema, will bring us a story that could well be that of a neighbor, a friend or our own. It will confirm that the sensation of feeling observed is not a paranoid delirium of our minds, but the clear evidence of a spying machinery that acts in the shadows.

Those who are able to get a seat, will be able to identify in the face and the attitude of Wiesler (the Stasi captain) the agent “Moises” or “Erick”, “Carlos” or “Alejandro.” They will understand that the business of bugging telephone lines, filling a house with microphones, or blackmailing someone with their darkest perversions, are techniques on which the boys of the Ministry of the Interior have no copyright.

I learned, a long time ago, that the best way to fool the “safeties” is to make public everything that one thinks. By signing our names, while saying aloud our opinions, and by not hiding anything, we disarm their dark maneuvers of vigilance. Let’s save them, then, with our “guts in the air,” from the long hours of listening to recordings, the undercover agents, the pricey gas of the cars in which they move and the long shifts searching the Internet for our divergent opinions.

Let’s know also that these, the ones from here, are not German. So from time to time they neglect their work in order to look at the swinging hips of a girl passing by; they also lose the papers or fall asleep while watching us through our windows. Regardless of that, they are similar to the Teutonic agents in their inability to show their faces, to tell their real names or to sign and publish all of what they say, to the ear, in the impunity of the shadows.