HAVANA TIMES – Before crossing the threshold in leaving the house, the ritual is not to check whether you have your keys or your wallet. The ritual is to clean your phone.
It’s not just a matter of deleting a chat or removing a photo from your gallery. It is a painstaking task: you go into your settings, clear the cache, erase your browsing history, and inspect every last corner to make sure not the slightest trace remains of what you said, read, or thought. You clean your device as if you were trying to conceal evidence of a crime. Except that in Venezuela, the “crime” is simply expressing an opinion or disagreeing.
Practically everyone I know does the same thing.
That is why the much-touted Anti-Hate Law is not a law against hate. In reality, it is a Law of Hate.
It is a law that hates the fact that you think, that you feel, that you are hurt by what is happening, and above all, that you disagree. It does not seek to curb violence; it wields violence from the seat of power. It knows that if it can make you hesitate before typing a sentence, force you to look over your shoulder on a bus, or compel you to strip your phone of its contents every morning, then fear has already won.
That fear does not end at the screen. What follows a police checkpoint or an arbitrary detention is a void. There was a French yoga instructor who spent months behind bars, accused of “espionage.” When he was finally released and able to speak from his own country, he described the prisons not as detention centers, but as veritable concentration camps—places where systematic torture is inflicted and human dignity is utterly destroyed.
And he was lucky enough to get out alive to tell his story. Many others have not been able to speak. Their families spent weeks hearing the same response at police stations: “He/she is not here. He/she was never brought here.” People whose very existence is denied by the state, only for their bodies to turn up in a morgue sometime later, victims of a system that denies a detainee ever existed until it delivers a corpse.
There was no need to build walls around cities or station a guard on every street corner. It was enough to slip the threat into every citizen’s pocket and back it up with the horror of imprisonment, until we became our own censors.
Foucault’s Panopticon* is more alive than ever.
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*Michel Foucault used the Panopticon as a powerful philosophical metaphor in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish to describe how modern society controls human behavior through constant surveillance
Read more from the diary of Antígona Urbana here on Havana Times.