The Land and Its Memory
HAVANA TIMES – They say that women are to be loved without haste, with open arms and an exposed soul. I don’t know if that’s poetry, but that’s how my grandfather loved the earth. He spoke its language, understood the whisper of roots growing among the rocks, the sound of rain upon its skin. He felt its breath under the sun, how it rested between the moon and the dew.
He came to Pinar del Río from Matanzas with his parents and sisters. They were chasing a dream scented with dry tobacco and freshly cut grass. They bought land and built a house, and there among the hills and fields our story began.
He was only nine when life forced him to stop being a child. His father abandoned his disabled mother, taking almost everything with him and leaving behind a broken home on the edge of poverty. But he, the only son in the family, took up the plow of responsibility. His small, callus-free hands learned to guide oxen, care for cattle, plant and harvest. He grew in rhythm with the seasons and began shaping a future he barely understood.
In time, he made the fields prosper. He met a young woman, married, and they had eleven children. He built a large house with plastered walls, and they were able to leave behind the humble hut of wood and palm thatch. He bought a truck with which he carried his harvests all over the island.
Then 1959 arrived, sweeping away what he had built. They left him a strip of land, a yoke of oxen, a cow, and a horse. He had to watch as bulldozers leveled the palm groves, as they took away the cattle he had raised alongside his children. Perhaps others would have let disillusion take root. Not him. He started again from zero and flourished, like the land after a burn.
When the cooperatives were born, he recovered a tiny fraction of what had once been his land. He raised cows, goats, sheep, horses, and fine roosters that earned fame in the world of forbidden fights. My uncles teased him, saying he loved them more than he loved us, but we all knew that wasn’t true. Everything he did was for the well-being of his family.
I grew up running through those fields with my brother and cousins. The empty henhouses were our playhouses, the loft where dried corn was stored became our treasure cave full of golden nuggets. Among the rice dikes we pretended to fish, the cassava fields were the perfect place to play war. We were free—the wind on our faces and the damp earth beneath our feet.
My daughter never lived any of that. My grandparents were gone by the time she was born, and the family had slowly scattered. Many of my relatives left for other parts of the world, and after drinking the “Coca-Cola of forgetfulness,” they left behind letters and memory.
She was born in the countryside but is a stranger to it. She doesn’t fear frogs, but horses terrify her. Yet these days, necessity placed a challenge in her path. After two hours waiting at a bus stop under the blazing midday sun, a man appeared in his araña—a humble carriage drawn by a horse. If we wanted to get home, there was no other choice. I saw her close her eyes, tame her fear, and climb aboard.
On her tense, weary face, I glimpsed for a moment my grandfather facing his own fate with steady hands and a fixed gaze. Sometimes inheritance is not the land or the cattle, but the ability to keep moving forward when everything pushes the other way.
Even if my daughter never ran barefoot through furrows, she carries in her blood the same courage that, at only nine years old, once made my grandfather the pillar of his family.
They say the land holds memory; in this case, blood does too.