Cuba Has Become a Country of Empty Houses

The house is still there, but no one has lived in it for a long time.

By Rachel Pereda (El Toque)

HAVANA TIMES – Sometimes I wonder at what moment it stopped being a house and became the home of absences. I don’t know if it was that night while we were on our way to the airport, leaving behind not just walls and roofs, but a part of ourselves. Or if it was much earlier, when we realized we couldn’t stay; when we began getting rid of our belongings, selling some, giving away others, like someone handing out pieces of their story that can never be recovered.

Or maybe it was that early morning when someone forced open the window, came in, and took the little that was left, leaving a hole in the glass and an even bigger one in the memory of that empty place that had once been so full.

In Cuba, there are more and more shuttered houses every day. Homes that once overflowed with life are now mausoleums of memories. On every block there’s an uninhabited house, a broken family, a living room where light no longer enters, a table that was never again set for mealtimes. Houses like ours, frozen in time, silent witnesses to an exodus that seems never-ending.

The news came the way all bad news comes to emigrants: through a cold message, without preamble or anesthesia, in the middle of the night, because night has that mysterious habit of harboring fears. “They broke into the house,” I was told. “They didn’t even bother to do it quietly.”

A blunt blow to the chest, as if that broken window had been my own skin. I didn’t ask for details. There was no point. I knew there was nothing to be done, that the house no longer belonged to us beyond the paperwork, and that the memories we left inside couldn’t be recovered either.

It wasn’t just our house. It’s the story of thousands. In every neighborhood there’s a forced gate, a door that no longer shuts properly, a wall marked by whatever used to hang there. These are houses looted not only of furniture, but of futures. Behind every empty window is a scattered family, names written down in airports across the world, children learning new languages, mothers who left the coffee pot on for the last time not knowing they would never use it again.

In Cuba, shuttered houses have become a metaphor for absence. They are the tangible proof of what emigration takes with it: not just people, but stories, friends, laughter, conversations on the porch, life itself. And when they’re ransacked, when even the last chair is taken, what’s left isn’t just a hole in the window. It’s a void that no one can fill.

First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.