Mother’s Day in Cuba and The Value of Tradition

By Veronica Vega

HAVANA TIMES – Every second Sunday in May, my mother would anxiously wait for someone to knock at the door with Mother’s Day postcards. They were locally made, with flower images.

They never arrived all at once, and for her, the repetition of the ritual—going to the door and discovering who had remembered to send her greetings—was a celebration.

Among those postcards were the ones from us, her three eldest daughters. My youngest sister hadn’t been born yet.

For Mom, we were capable of saving for months, stuffing coins into a sock we hid in a hole in the mattress. All so we could surprise her with a modest gift.

But without her, the day now seems meaningless to the three of us. None of us has managed to pass on to our own children that same excitement that made the day so special. Not because we don’t recognize the sacrifices of motherhood. Not because we don’t want our children to see the date as a chance to express their love for us. I suppose, as my son says, my mother came from a time in Cuba when economic uncertainty didn’t consume every bit of attention, day after day.

In times of normalcy, commemorations have genuine meaning. But how do you uphold the hypocrisy of a celebration if you’re not even sure you’ll be able to feed your family? Poverty forces us to develop an involuntary pragmatism, one that has gradually swept away so many social rituals.

Now social media holds the hypnotic power to keep you distracted in its tangle of posts and messages, and so, amid the exhausting routine of cooking before the next blackout, the day slips away.

When there was a supply of liquefied gas, cooking took hours.

Using an electric hot plate—even if you’re lucky enough to have a family member lighten your workload with a rice cooker or even the famous Reina pressure cooker—the race against time and the ever-shifting power outage schedules steals all peace and joy.

Sometimes, I get the bitter feeling that all I do in a day is cook.

My mom always had this fixation on making sure our stomachs were full, as if that guaranteed some essential satisfaction. Not happiness, but a prelude to what, in other circumstances, could be called a minimum sense of security. Even if that security was pieced together, as though we truly believed that fate, or God, or the universe, would provide for the next day. But the truth is we don’t trust in that tomorrow—we haven’t learned to live like the birds.

Especially mothers, they are never truly free, not even when their children are grown. Not only because grandchildren come along, but because uncertainty remains the bond that ties us together.

At least that’s how it is with children or relatives who still live in Cuba.

We share a dysfunction that has been forcibly normalized, and the jokes it generates are not enough to bring relief. Maybe because of this chaotic reality, where the only constants are shortages, instability, and loss, is the direct cause of broken families, absent children, and traumas no postcard, digital or physical, can heal.

A dull, constant pain that no gift can erase. Even if it manages to soften the fear of tomorrow, of food’s fleeting presence, it doesn’t matter how many hours you spent standing in the kitchen. (The relentless legacy passed on to daughters.)

For years, when the second Sunday in May arrives, I think of my mother, and as much as I miss her, I find comfort in the thought that she’s no longer in this world. I don’t have to share with her this decline that I no longer know how to process myself.

I’m spared of the speculation of how long this sadness will last, the one that silently corrodes the walls of homes that still stand, or collapse, the streets that crack and empty of cars, giving that heavy Sunday feeling.

A country in flight, someone once said. And in the flight, in the stampede, how could one possibly preserve the innocent sacredness of dates and rituals?

They simply vanish, even if you cling to them like amulets tucked between clothing and chest. Those details that we used to believe in to protect us from misfortune.

The sinister weight orbiting this island, dispersing family ties, recycling despair, has particularly damaged the role of mothers: that role of planting hope as a certainty in the next generation.

Read more from the diary of Veronica Vega here.