CAMAGÜEY. — A few days ago, I was invited to a space to talk about what it means to think about culture in viral times. It was a hot morning with an unstable internet connection, yet the room was full of young people, art and communication students among them. At one point, one of them raised her hand and said something that struck me deeply. I’ll summarize her words, which carried an urgency: it’s useless to stand still.
“We can’t stop doing,” she insisted, and then asked, How can we demand energy from the young if the generations before us seem defeated? If the adults who teach us have surrendered to routine, apathy, or circumstance?
There was silence, followed by long applause. She spoke not from complaint but from urgency. Her voice carried both exhaustion and hope. From there, the conversation turned toward emotional intelligence — a terrain that, as I said then, we have not yet fully learned to cultivate in Cuba. I often repeat a phrase I once saw on one of those encouraging internet postcards: “If the mind is the place where we live every day, we must make it a kind place to inhabit.”
Perhaps that’s why, when a friend suggested The Bell Jar, the novel by American writer Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), I knew it was the right moment to read it. For weeks, I’d been in that in-between state where reading resists itself: you want to, but life gives you no rest. Days in Camagüey resemble one another — lines, heat, blackouts, fatigue, fading conversations. Still, I keep reading — maybe out of necessity more than discipline. And in my hands, that novel from another era, written by a woman from another country, spoke to me with unexpected intimacy.
Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar in 1963, shortly before her death. Its protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a brilliant nineteen-year-old girl who travels to New York after winning a scholarship at a fashion magazine. But her brilliance soon dims: social expectations, the demand for perfection, and the feeling of being out of place drag her into deep depression. The “bell jar” of the title becomes a metaphor for mental confinement, for living as if there were no air to breathe.
As I read, I thought of that young woman from the discussion — her plea to keep moving — and of so many others in Cuba who strive to do, to create, to resist. Plath’s novel doesn’t speak of our political or material hardships, yet it touches something we share: that sense of inner confinement, of emotional suffocation. Esther feels trapped by other people’s expectations, by the demand to be the “perfect girl.” Here, in our own reality, the bell jar takes different shapes — exhaustion, uncertainty, lack of horizons, the endless noise of what never changes.
There is something universal in that image of the glass that separates. In Cuba, in 2025, many live under their own bell jar: those who cannot migrate and those who no longer wish to leave; those who stay silent to survive; those who still dream quietly. The bell jar isn’t always a psychiatric institution — as in the novel — sometimes it’s an island struggling to breathe.
In the story, there comes a moment when Esther realizes that the world she had been promised — that idea of personal success, of mutual love, of professional recognition — was a farce built upon other people’s molds. She discovers that the glamour surrounding her in New York was just a layer of varnish, and that behind the smiles of powerful men or the condescending advice of women who already “knew their place” lay a web of deceit. That awakening — painful, desolate — marks her fall, but also her lucidity: to see the illusion is the beginning of freedom.
I think of that when I look at many Cuban women — heirs to a narrative that tells them they are the backbone of the home, the nation, the family, the hope… yet rarely are they allowed simply to be. They carry the weight of collective expectations and double standards: they must be strong but gentle, self-sacrificing yet optimistic, creative yet discreet. In that impossible balance, many of us feel the same as Esther — the deceit of a promised freedom that still hasn’t fully arrived.
The mirage of “everything will get better” resembles the “everything is fine” that surrounded Esther. But women — there and here — learn to see with new eyes, to unmask the fictions of what we are supposed to be. Perhaps that is the true emotional intelligence we lack: not hiding discomfort, but recognizing it without guilt; saying aloud that we too are tired, that we too want to breathe.
What is most unsettling about Plath is that her writing does not seek comfort. It is a lucid voice that dares to name pain with almost surgical precision. And yet, beneath that gaze lies a hidden tenderness, a need for words to heal. That is why reading her today is not only a literary act — it is also an act of care.
In one of the novel’s most memorable passages, Esther imagines her life as a fig tree:
“From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, another fig was a famous poet, another fig was a brilliant professor… and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.”
That image haunted me for days. It is a parable about the paralysis of desire — about what happens when all options seem both possible and impossible. Esther doesn’t choose because she fears losing the others. And while she hesitates, time passes, life withers. Isn’t that a familiar feeling even now?
Every Cuban generation has had its own bell jar — different in form, yet alike in its deceptive transparency. What changes is the way we break it, or at least crack it. In the 1960s, the bell jar was morality and silence; in the 1990s, survival; today, perhaps, it is information overload and emotional fatigue. But through all of them runs the same desire: to breathe.
That is why Sylvia Plath remains necessary. Every generation needs someone to remind them that lucidity is not incompatible with hope. To read, to create, to speak — all of that is like opening a small slit in the glass so that a little air can come in.
Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez