On Cuban Identity

The core of Cuban identity comes from making fun of everything, "chotearlo todo." That's what differentiates us. Laugh it all, we seem to say to ourselves; laugh it all because the only certain thing in life is death. This core of identity that makes us mock at everything in life is also our Achilles heel. We are incapable of taking anything seriously and that's why we cannot project ourselves into the future as a nation and a people. One of the few exceptions to this rule is our national hero Jose Marti, somebody who took his life so seriously that after leaving a superhuman output of literary work and political activism exposed himself to the enemy to get killed at still a young age as if to redeem the lack of spiritual get it together of the Cubans: it is the things that you do in life and the way you die what defines who you were. If Jesus does not have died in the cross it would have never being the Christ. Too loose in our tribalistic separations, distances exacerbated by the figure that must have pull us together, the state, instead of being a nation builder and an aglutinator of people has been for the past 55 years our main force of diremption and dispersion.
But one thing we owe to el choteo: El choteo propitiates de dissolving, through humor, of conflicts that would otherwise escalate into physical violence and harm.