The Shared Anguish of Three Cuban Mothers
HAVANA TIMES – Living in Cuba is a test of endurance. Some would say it’s a roller coaster that never stops, but I think it moves at a painfully slow pace. That’s how the country runs: with a government juggling desperately to avoid losing control. If you’re lucky and the power hasn’t gone out when you stop to rest, you’ll hear the same promises as always on television. Seen from the outside, the country looks like a circus, a caricature, a meme… but it’s more serious than that.
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Olga is 65. She lives in Havana but isn’t originally from there. She holds a master’s degree in Psychopedagogy and worked at a school, but to support her family she has had to clean floors, care for the elderly and babies, and sell fish she smuggles in from another province. “Havana is very expensive,” she tells me. She retired so she could spend time with her grandchildren. Now she feels her life takes place between two countries, between two opposite worlds.
On the island lives her ex-husband—an unshakable fidelista-marxist-leninist-chavista-madurista-canelista. A retired former military man.
Also there is her mother, who used to keep track of numbers for those who played the illegal lottery. Now the elderly woman is deeply afraid of the dark. “How long will this go on? We’ve been over 15 hours without electricity. And they still don’t want people saying ‘homeland and life,’” Olga’s mother yells when she calls the Electric Company, before they hang up on her. Every day, she complains to some anonymous voice on the other end of the line.
Olga doesn’t want to hear about repression in Cuba. She doesn’t want to “know about politics.” However, it’s politics that has distanced her from her eldest son and may soon drive her younger son to leave the country.
So many children have left so many mothers. Some can never return. Others died trying to escape.
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Lulu is a single mother of a 3-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy. She didn’t finish her studies and has never worked for the Cuban state.
Her little girl doesn’t have access to state daycare, so she looks after her herself. Her son, who attends a sports school, walks several kilometers every day to come home for lunch and then walk back. Lulu jokes that with all the expenses for sports equipment, her son could be studying at Harvard. “He hasn’t even made it to a single regional competition—there’s never fuel to take them.”
Lulu’s father died when she was 14. The father of her daughter, on the other hand, emigrated to the United States via the Nicaragua route. Now they’re separated.
Lulu gets by with a small street vending stall. “It barely covers food,” she admits. She wants to leave Cuba. “Like everyone. There’s no one and nothing left here.” But she’s firm: “I won’t go without my two kids. I’m not leaving anyone behind.”
But she doesn’t have enough money to leave. Her house, which she’s tried to sell “with everything inside,” no longer has enough value to cover the cost of the journey. “And besides, they already shut down access to the US with that Trump guy,” she adds, resigned.
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Lucrecia, 84, barely gets out of bed. Sometimes she screams “when she wants attention.” “I’m afraid one day it will be real, something will happen to her, and no one will believe her,” says a neighbor who’s practically family.
She has two children, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. In Cuba, one son and two grandchildren remain.
She’s lived with her husband for over half a century. Now they share the bed nearly all day. “I thought he’d be the one to lose his mind first, but now he’s the one taking care of her. He’s hanging on as best he can,” said the neighbor.
Lucrecia graduated in Chemistry from the University of Las Villas and worked in sugar mills until a hand injury forced her to change course. She began teaching but left the classroom one day, upset by the “political demands” they made of her. She never returned and was left without a pension.
Lucrecia was an only child and never knew her father. Her mother, a nurse at the clinic of Raul Dorticos Torrado, brother of President Osvaldo Dorticos, told her stories of a different Cuba.
Lucrecia lived through the September 5, 1957 uprising in Cienfuegos. To those who know her well, she’s told a thousand times how the walls of her house still bear the marks of that day’s gunfire, how she hid a fellow student in her wardrobe, and how “almost everything the regime says about that day is a lie.” She also states openly that Fidel “destroyed Cuba.” “He destroyed everything. He didn’t even leave us our dignity,” she insists.
From afar, she continues to talk with the granddaughter she raised as a daughter, who now lives thousands of kilometers away in another country. She always starts the same way: “Things are really bad here. There’s nothing. Do you know how much beans cost?” Then she lists prices until suddenly, for the umpteenth time, she tells a story that everyone around her already knows.
Lucrecia has someone to take care of her. In today’s Cuba, that’s a blessing. But loneliness isn’t just about having someone there. Sometimes it seems she doesn’t want to live anymore. That’s very frightening. It’s been over five years since her granddaughter last hugged her.
*The names of the women in this text have been changed.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.