Abreus: A Militant Spirit in Poetry
By Anisley Fernandez Diaz
HAVANA TIMES – My poems are no longer my poems. They belong to pain. They belong to silence. The duty to confess disaffection, pride, or anything that ignores the needs of Cuban women has died within me. What happens if a woman doesn’t want to leave Cuba? If she takes a different path from the disruptive poets of the eighties?
Someone once told me: If we leave, nothing will be fixed. One loses her youth trying to discover her image in the social poetry of silences, suffering in this nobody’s-land of a homeland. Displacing oneself from places where art is politics. A woman of rupture is always at war with politics. A woman who writes and serves God is a danger. I know this from the loneliness that invades my nights.
Necessity imposes itself. The need to be militant in the Holy Spirit is a mystery that bends my will. I have questioned being Jewish for various reasons and have witnessed how faith moves mountains. Collaborating in an Intercession Ministry where fasting occurred, with foreheads prostrated, until the body became frail, I discovered the power of prayer. There is One God, who is enough. As time passes and questions remain unanswered, we go to Him.
How does one integrate poetry and the cross of surviving in a country, in a country doped by fear?
Abreus is a small and bucolic town in the province of Cienfuegos. There, doctors work under the effects of endless scarcity. There, you become a beast. A beast to survive the blackouts. A beast to save a life with what little there is. The doctor’s problem with the authorities is that they do not respect you as a human. You can be human, but there is no reciprocity. “We will give you the neighborhood clinic house if you stay.” Empty house. House without keys. House, I have not been able to inhabit. Psychological torture, always torture.
I devote my mornings to the elderly, pregnant women, and children. And I must endure my pain without Ibuprofen, without stable treatment, without the reagent. My muscle pains still have no answer because “there is no reagent.” Because I have to make money to get treated in Havana.
The problem is Havana. I remember the day I fell in the Calixto hospital. I slipped from hunger and rolled down the cafeteria stairs. The problem is my mother who never acknowledged her mistake. My mother had me without wanting to. My mother is a narcissist. My mother always knew that faith in God would be necessary for me. My mother is me putting rags on during my menstrual period. Washing my blood in my mother’s water, in my mother’s house, which is no longer and will never be my home.
I never belonged to myself, nor do I belong to these places. My homeland is high and far. My mother goes to pray at church, but I do not even trust mother. I remember the day I fell. I didn’t fracture my vertebrae because God is great. But my God is not the dictator that many construct. My God understands that I can be bisexual and be a mother. That I am not and will never be perfect. That I can think differently from the entire world. I know that my perfect family can be Him alone.
Abreus is great for faith. To make my poems return to me. To distance myself from everything that demeans me. I function. I ponder. I bless the country and its leaders. Cuba becomes nothing. Cuba drinks the glory of Christ and I drink it with all its miseries, because now I am militant in the Spirit. Cuba is in ashes and will give birth. I want to thank you, oh God. I want to thank you, Abreus.