I'm unconvinced you'll listen to me, so...

... I've taken the liberty of posting at nothing but hat's an entry from Generacion Y, a blog maintained by a pretty smart young lady. I recommend that you read it, and be thankful because, if you were actually on the island, you probably wouldn't have access to the blog TO read it if you wanted to, considering how she's being censored - just a little.

From Generacion Y:

For several years I’ve been noticing that we’ve stopped using such conciliatory words “excuse me”, “pardon me” and “I’m sorry”. When we screw something up, we would rather blame clumsiness than admit our failure. Into that absurd “code of national male-chauvinism”, with laughable phrases as “a real man doesn’t drink soup, a real man doesn’t eat sweets, etc., etc.”, someone has added the phrase: “A real Cuban doesn’t have to apologize.”

I remember the hilarious anecdote of a friend of mine, whose toe was “crushed” by the narrow heel of a lady passing by. When he realized the lady was not going to apologize, he got closer to her and said, “Forgive me, my lady, for getting your heel dirty.” The woman didn’t like the irony at all, and she came very close to again crushing the toe of her “victim.” All this because she didn’t want to pronounce the magic words that proved her regret for the mistake she made.

How many times have we been badly waited on, insulted or ignored by a waiter who is incapable of articulate words as, “I’m very sorry, Sir.” A phrase like that is not the key to the problem, but at least it leaves you with the sensation that there no premeditation went in such a bad service. The record of pending apologies, however, goes to the bureaucrats and politicians. They’ve been our teachers in this “intensive course for not regretting anything.”

We are exceptional students of a government who, in the almost fifty years of “dancing alone” in the stage of our politics, has never given an apology for anything. We’ve been waiting in vain for the necessary mea culpa for the revolutionary crackdown in 1968, for the atrocity of the repudiation meetings, for the dependence on the Soviet Union, and for the successive and disastrous economic plans that ended up in this productive asphyxiation. Anyway, the list is so long and so dramatic that, instead of an apology, it demands a prolonged act of “public flagellation.”

Oh, well. I already know politicians never apologize. That’s why we, small copies of them, who imitate them, repeating their slogans and poses, also emulate them in not apologizing. “For what?”, the lady who stepped on my friend’s foot would ask. “We already have our toe crushed, and up there they don’t want to recognize they already have their soles dirty.”