Cuba is Like a Giant Tomb for the Living
HAVANA TIMES — A friend of my mother’s stopped by the house and kindly shared some multivitamin supplements with her. Everyone at home was thrilled. I, at least, received them as if they were an invitation to the Bavarian Festival in Germany—which is one of my dreams—or like a vacation to enjoy a carnival in Brazil (I apologize for thinking only about having fun; it must be because I’m deeply marked by frustration and deprivation, I suppose). Because—and I’m certain of what I’m about to say—in Cuba, painkillers, sedatives, and vitamins are true treasures.
This is my third month dealing with the aftereffects of the virus (Chikungunya), and the dengue I suffered afterward also keeps me feeling unwell. Of course, I can’t walk much. Otherwise, the next day the pain throughout my body is unbearable. From my window I look at the hill I used to walk almost every day, sometimes even twice a day. I haven’t been able to make that walk again, not even in my thoughts. When I’ve tried, I’ve only managed to get halfway, and on the way back I feel very strong muscle contractions that make my arms ache. I still have no strength in my hands. I thought I would have to say goodbye to the guitar as well. But recently I went back to doing a few basic exercises, and I almost died of joy, because I thought I’d never be able to play it again in any way.
My aunt told me the other day that her pain sometimes continues as strong as before. It even wakes her in the middle of the night. She said she was already prepared to accept it as chronic. Of course that saddened me, because continuing to live with these limitations in our bodies is not as easy as it might sound. That’s why pills play such an important role every day in our lives. They ease us, allow us to breathe with more peace and fewer complaints. And that is no small thing for any human being.
It catches my attention that when a friend told me that, for her, this virus was spread by the Cuban government itself, I wasn’t surprised. Nor was I surprised when more people told me the same. Because I know this is a reality for many women and men in the country.
The reasons that have been shared with me—and that I myself have thought through—lead us to think this way. The government prefers people in bed to people in the streets protesting all the rights they don’t have, because the Cuban state has proven incapable of generating or producing. The government prefers people going crazy searching for food and thinking about what they’re going to invent to eat the next day, rather than people who have their basic needs resolved and time to think about how to make a better country. This chaos suits the government, even though in its speeches on TV it says it’s looking for solutions, like on the program Cuadrando la caja, which, when I watch it, all I think is: “There is no solution with these people.”
These experiences are not welcomed, obviously. It is very painful to be aware that we are part of a sick, hungry, frustrated, and often desperate people. But it is revealing when you realize you’re not the only one rowing the boat. When others share their views with you and you agree, because all the data you live and receive points in the same direction. Even though there’s always someone who tells you to “resist a little longer because Cuba has the best human project possible.” These are the caste of leaders, military men, and some elderly person who tells you: “You didn’t live through the young people killed by Batista on street corners.”
And out of respect you don’t answer them—that it’s true, we don’t see people being killed on street corners—but half of Cuba is behind bars for peacefully demonstrating, and the rest is also imprisoned, even if it doesn’t know it. I, for better or worse, am in the group that does know it: because when they wanted to, they took away my right to leave for another country, and they have also taken away my right to leave my own house—and that’s the case for all of Cuba. Except for Sandro Castro, for obvious reasons.
Nor am I going to answer that generation of elders who lived through those experiences and still defend this system. It seems they need more garbage dumps, high prices, precarious wages, blackouts, exiles, famines, lack of potable water, viruses, and more helplessness in trying to obtain the basics and failing to do so… in order to rethink how they are thinking politically in the present.
For now, I give thanks for solidarity. These blessed hands that reach us with vitamins; those aspirins, Tylenol, ibuprofen, alprazolam; others that help with leg pain, muscle pain, and I don’t know how many other things. Along with thanking all the friends who send us messages of encouragement, who share their faith, experiences, and hopes to keep moving forward. Because all of that is sacred, especially in the midst of catastrophes, like the one I feel in the Cuba I live in. Not stopping dreaming, holding on to illusions, is fundamental in any human life. That’s what I believe today, and what I think I will always uphold.