Recounting the Times I’ve Seen

August 29, 2024

HAVANA TIMES – In attempting to give a historical account of the situations, circumstances and experiences that make up social life in my neighborhood – the place I’ve always lived – I realize I’ve had to witness the nearly definitive departure – unrelated to death – of a huge number of relatives, neighbors, workmates and friends.

We always want to classify everything. To group things together, in order to understand them better. It’s a way of ordering the world, to try and comprehend it a little.

Right now, I was about to say with complete certainty “In Cuba,” and talk about my whole country. However, although I still feel very certain about the general occurrence of events, I discover that I really can’t back up such a reference, since I’ve lived in Havana for my whole life. It’s true I did my military service in Cabañas, Pinar del Rio; and in order to be discharged from military life, they sent me to cut sugar cane in Colon, Matanzas province, but basically, I’ve always lived in Havana. Hence, I’m going to speak only about the experiences I can completely substantiate.

In Havana, you separate the people you know into two bands: “those who are here,” and “those who left.” Or, better yet, “those who are here,” and “those who are going to leave.” And everyone then flavors that last concept however they can, because it includes nearly everyone. Every person includes in it as many as they want, according to what they can bear, and then proceeds to pour what they can into the idea: their small joys, their pinches of sorrow, their small angers, a tinge of envy…

The first time in my life that I heard talk of someone who left was a long time ago, shortly before 1959. It was my Uncle Florencio, who had arranged a long-distance marriage with a cousin of his who lived in New York, in order to have the right to reside in the United States. In the end, they established a solid marriage that lasted their entire lives.

But in my perception – I was a child – it was because there weren’t any good jobs, but also because he was a little more ambitious, in the good sense of that word. The family, out of resentment or as a consolation, called him too much of a dreamer, a little crazy, or a bit of an adventurer. But there was a lot of money to be made in New York in 1957.

I also recall that, at that time, not as many people left with the idea of staying there. At every turn, someone was going to Miami to do some shopping and would be back later. You didn’t even have to have a visa. I remember that before 1968, there was still a little shop on every corner, a food stand, a pharmacy, a café or a bar. Twice a week, a man would come by on a three-wheeled motorbike selling fresh fish – not because it was on ice, but because it had just been pulled from the sea, none of those fish frozen for months.

Now, in the middle of remembering, reality takes me by surprise – All of a sudden! Reality! And it’s horrible. In reality, like I said in the beginning of this piece, I had never thought about leaving. The idea of being another of “those who yearn to leave,” or “those who would, if they could,” never crossed my mind.

Just today, I read on the news that they had decided to cut two hours a day from the electricity supply to Havana, in solidarity with the populations in the country’s interior, who are suffering ten-hour blackouts.

The problem isn’t that “things are tough” in Cuba, or that “you can no longer tolerate it,” because that doesn’t seem at all true to me. It’s that living is no longer a pleasure. That French concept, “joie de vivre” – the joy of living – has been lost.

Everything we talk about, everything we plan or experience revolves around how to subsist, with the goal of maintaining the same status of subsistence, all in honor of some remote glories that were achieved, but in the end, you can’t identify what they were.

It’s a mater of fighting tooth and nail to maintain the same status of subsistence, like a tragic and sublime effort to sustain the continuity of the same level of misery, not with the ancient promises of a hopeful future, but with the assurances of this being all there is. It’s an obstinacy that would make you suspect low intelligence, if not for the existence of someone out there who is benefitting.