Silent Rebellion
Category : Impulse
Dalia
Silent Rebellion
Havana after midnight does not sleep—it rehearses.
A sodium lamp quivers above the Malecón, striking the sea like flint.
Between the slabs of salt‑stained wall and the rippling dark, boys lean into shadowed doorways, sculpting themselves out of stillness. Their faces—flat planes of indifference—are masks cast in the oldest alloy on the island: machismo.
They do not speak; what needs saying would fracture the metal.
The Opacity of Man
In this landscape, power is not shouted.
It is curated in omission—the deliberate refusal to yield one gesture more than required.
Opacity becomes a virtue precisely because it is a fortress:
‚If you cannot read me, you cannot ruin me.‘
Yet the same fortress is also a cistern, collecting a private tide of fear.
Admiration arrives, yes, but never intimacy; a man whose interior is a locked vault eventually forgets the combination himself.
Women in Flash‑Light
Then the street swivels: two girls pivot into the neon, skin catching fire like fresh paint.
They offer visibility—hips angled, laughter flung up like confetti—while their eyes stay unlit, withholding an archive of longings, debts, and half‑healed bruises.
Promiscuity here is not excess. It is choreography.
A quiet manifesto scrawled across bare shoulders: Nothing you project onto me will imprison me unless I consent.
The city decays around them—stucco skin peeling, iron balconies hemorrhaging rust—yet the corrosion reveals a second surface, not uglier, only truer.
Virtue & Tragedy of Concealment
Concealment rescues dignity in a place where exposure is currency.
But its price is solitude: the opaque man isolates himself; the revealed woman is still unseen.
They pass each other like mirrored ships—each glimpsing only the reflection of the other’s myth.
Strength and vulnerability do not reconcile; they exist as parallel monologues spoken to absent audiences.
Promiscuity as Rebellion
Inside a drained swimming pool a boy and a girl swirl barefoot through ankle‑deep rainwater, filming each other with cheap phones.
The pool’s pale blue walls echo with centuries of etiquette they refuse to memorize.
Body touches water, water touches camera sensor—an unstable trinity, but in that instability lies freedom.
Promiscuity blooms here as praxis, not thrill: a cartography of forbidden routes over a map stapled to their backs at birth.
Each kiss redraws the border between submission and sovereignty; each bruise is a small republic.
Youth, Body, Decay
Skin glistens—you can almost hear it; a low hum of salt, sweat, and August electricity.
Yet every surface around that skin remembers disintegration. Crumbling plaster. Windowpanes blistered by hurricanes older than any of the dancers.
The juxtaposition writes itself: youth is an incandescent sentence scrawled on paper already burning.
They dance anyway. Perhaps they dance because nothing else is sufficiently alive.
‚Yara and Omar‘
Seeing and Being Seen
Photography is often accused of theft—of stealing souls with each exposure.
But in these streets the lens is merely a witness; the real burglary occurs in the gaze exchanged before the shutter clicks.
To be seen is perilous.
To remain invisible is erasure.
What remains, then, is the oscillation: reveal, withhold, reveal, withhold—until sight itself becomes an organ of negotiation.
Closing: The Quiet Pulse
Dawn. A ripple of pastel pink threads the horizon.
The boys retreat indoors, armour intact; the girls unknot their hair and walk home in sandals that slap the pavement like sotto voce applause.
Rain begins—soft, apologetic.
In its hush I sense the true rebellion: not the nocturnal gestures, but the fact that these bodies, these dreams, insist on tomorrow.
Their silence is not surrender; it is a strategy of endurance, a calculus of when to speak and when to shine.
And if strength sometimes masquerades as opacity, it is only because transparency here can be lethal.
Yet beneath each cultivated shadow lies a pulse—irrefutable, tender—waiting for a moment of unguarded light.
´Joerg Alexander / Berlin / Mittwoch, 20.04.25
