Year-End Depression
By Lorenzo Martín
HAVANA TIMES – It had been a while since I wrote because I’ve been depressed, perhaps for too long. Looking around and seeing everything crumble is oppressive, depressing. The city is falling apart, society is crumbling, the family is falling apart, life is falling apart…
Finally, I found a way to wake up from this lethargy and try to resume my life. A bad time to do so. The end of the year only brings back old memories that I try to reclaim, but reality surpasses them. Finally, I realize that it’s not that I am depressed, but that my island of joy, that same island of tobacco, rum, and guaracha, is depressed, sad, definitely broken… and, friends, depression kills.
This Christmas, thanks to the money my daughter sends from her cold current geography, there was no shortage of food on my table. It’s true that pork was expensive, and don’t even mention the beans, but I needed to make dinner, more for mom than anything else. Mom doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t complain, but she misses, and I read it in her eyes.
Mom has always been strong, enduring life’s hardships with admirable stoicism. If something affects her, it’s loneliness, not being able to gather her loved ones occasionally. It affects her not having her children together, even if there’s an argument that forces her to play the role of referee. It affects her a lot not having grandchildren roaming the kitchen to ‘steal’ a plantain chip or a piece of the most roasted meat.
Mom doesn’t complain, but the sadness in her eyes threatens to be definitive, deadly, as if she expects nothing from life anymore and only desires that fatal and terrible blow from the Grim Reaper to end this reality.
I try to cheer her up, but the day-to-day doesn’t cooperate. Christmas was no exception. Our joy fades away second by second. Too many empty seats, and I’m not talking about food; I’m talking about unoccupied chairs that we don’t know when we’ll fill again because they went far away in search of new horizons, in search of a dignified life, or at least to help parents, children, and other relatives who are inevitably left behind.
Our joy fades away, and the cheerful neighbor didn’t come to intrude into the house without reason, to play a Cuban music track, or simply share his joy. That neighbor also left for lands with better hopes.
Empty streets, without loud music as we usually play, without a festive atmosphere, just three or four passersby doing the last errands of the year, looking for something to bring to the table. Nor did we hear the common shouts of pigs around this time while some improvised and inexperienced butcher put an end to their lives to end up on the grill.
In Cuban homes, there were no discussions this time about whose turn it was to be turning the roast pig, nor were the adults gathered in the backyard, drink in hand, making risqué jokes, nor the children’s uproar, nor the smell of roasted meat that used to fill the island these days… not even the neighborhood drunk made a fuss this time.
The Christmas table lacked the lechon, the tasty Habana Club rum, the beer, the tomatoes… happiness was missing, just like the hope that next year will be better and dreams will come true.
The few of us who had something to celebrate did so at the expense of the empty chairs that should be occupied by brothers, parents, and children who have left their seats empty and their souls vacant.
Our joy fades away, and while the ruling elite encourages us to welcome the new anniversary of the Cuban revolution with joy, creativity, and faith in a regime that has offered nothing for a long time now. It’s challenging for those who have a full table to understand the hungry one. The regime invites us to celebrate the revolution while announcing the most aggressive package of economic adjustments it has ever implemented, which will surely produce more misery, desperation, and broken families.
Our joy fades away and threatens to be irreversible. The island of rum and celebration has become a sterile desert where the only common dream is to escape, emigrate, leave everything behind. Our joy fades away, and depression is no longer a psychological problem for some; depression encompasses society as a whole, except for that small percentage that constitutes the ruling families and their closest acolytes.