What Sustains Us in Cuba Through the Dark?
HAVANA TIMES – I was five years old when the socialist bloc collapsed (1991). Its fall brought one of the darkest periods of the Cuban Revolution – the so-called Special Period, which right up until today hasn’t ended.
In my innocence, the best part of those times were the nightly blackouts. On those nights, all the neighbors would pull their chairs onto the sidewalk, while the shadows slowly covered us all. The adults would talk amongst themselves; I didn’t care what they were saying – “adult things” they’d say if we asked. My thing was to take advantage of the chance to play hide and seek with the kids on the block, hold hands with the boy I liked, or tell fantastic stories of the kind that gain more life as they go from mouth to mouth, from town to town.
It was fun living that way, in complete innocence and ignorance. My mother offered me absolute security, so much so that I never really knew what she did to feed my sister and myself. I never saw her eat; we never sat down together at the table. I also didn’t know how many hours she spent fanning us so we could sleep, nor when she herself slept. I only recall her sad, thin, and worried face. Even so, she was my safe port, my refuge, my first love. And when she looked at me, I was happy.
I wanted to be like her, because no matter how many blows life gave her, she never forgot to tell me “I love you.”
Later, I grew and began making my own path. Even though I loved her, at some point I forgot to tell her so. I suppose that life is something that goes by us while we’re occupied doing trivial things, diminishing the importance of the things that really have value.
I was in such a hurry to grow, and that was the stupidest wish I ever made in my early childhood. I had no idea how much I would lose.
Every year I said goodbye to another relative. The friends from the park were no longer there. I became a mother, and later a caregiver – first of my mother, then of my father and my grandfather who didn’t make it. So much responsibility comes from growing up in a country without a future, in unfertile ground, without values or empathy. But always holding on to it.
Today, at 39, amid a period more catastrophic than that of my early childhood, I can now imagine what the adults were talking about during those nights of blackout. The same doubts we have today; the same fears; the same uncertainty that has become part of Cubans’ everyday life: How can we feed our children? How much more will we have to bear? Do we have any rights? What more will we have to sacrifice?
Still in the shadows, my daughters don’t know what’s worrying their mother, nor the adults who surround them. In the darkness, they only seek to charge their phones to chat with their friends inside and outside of Cuba. They know well that those aren’t the big things, but they help them dream. They’ve had to say goodbye to family members and friends, like I did. And I don’t know if the same thing will also happen with the grandchildren that I don’t know if I’ll have.
What good is it to have a homeland if we have no life? What’s freedom when we’re dead?
In the middle of the first national power outage of 2025, I don’t have any communication with my mother, who’s fighting for her life in a Tampa hospital. I can’t see her, I can’t touch her or hear her.
The political decisions don’t affect those leading us, they don’t hurt the ones dictating the policies. The ones hurting are the parents, the brothers and sisters, and Cuban families, wherever they are, however they think.
I suppose that life can be summed up as letting it all go, but it hurts not to have the opportunity to say goodbye.
It hurts me, that I don’t know if some day I’ll once again feel like that girl who today misses her mother’s arms.
You told me once that the day you weren’t here anymore, I’d regret many things. “Don’t leave for later the things you can do today,” you told me. “Loving, forgiving, and failing don’t make you weak, Deymi.” And that’s what’s important.
I’m lucky that I still have you to tell you that you made me the best version of yourself. And I’ll mold my daughters into the best version of both of us.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times
How sad – my heart breaks for the Cuba I came to love yet not understand on my three visits there 10 years ago. Greedy despotic rulers who find no value in human life?
A good friend of mine in Camagüey has a 17 year-old son in his last year of “high school”. His father, my friend is a doctor and it has always been his dream for his son, my godson by the way, to follow his father into the medical profession and become a doctor as well. Nearly 20 years ago, when I met my friend during my first trip to central Cuba, he was making a house call to my casa particular to check on me during my first bout with dengue. I asked him at the end of the visit how much I owed him. He seemed genuinely reluctant to accept anything but I was persistent and convinced him that he couldn’t leave with anything less than 50cuc. He finally took it but left me with the impression that he just genuinely loved being a Doctor and helping his patients feel better. We have been friends ever since. After reading this well-written post, I was reminded how my brilliant godson doesn’t want to go into medicine because he doesn’t want to turn out poor like his father. Instead, he’s planning to get his licenciatura in gastronomia and hotel management. He wants to work in a hotel. Not because he doesn’t want to be a doctor, but just because he doesn’t want to be poor. I couldn’t be sadder for this young man but I absolutely understand. This is the future for Cuba.
Well said it best describes the current situation and the suffering
A beautifully written lament to the lost innocence of childhood, and to a life that should have been. Cuba is a failed experiment overall, yet the political and military elite have no compassion, empathy, or sympathy for the lives of others outside of their immediate circles. There’s not much to do but to hold on to hope for a better life. From afar I wish for strength and willpower to Deymi and all citizens of Cuba.
Repression and intimidation is the reason Cubans are suffering in silence, it’s how they can sustain that inhumane regime.