Author: Irina Echarry

So I entered to see what this was. I was expecting to find the best of the Cuban artistic vanguard of the 21st century: plutonium sculptures or videos that showed presidents from across South America urinating in the privacy of their homes. Or perhaps there would be some portrait painted with petroleum (men and women digging up the soil with their hands) as the symbol of future human destruction.

Maintaining vigilance doesn’t mean only the night watch; it’s much broader. It means being aware how many people on the block are neither working nor studying, who is throwing ostentatious parties for their children, who isn’t a good mother or a good worker, or who likes to drink at any hour of the day or night.

Thousands of writers, poets, novelists, essayists, young and not so young, who dedicated themselves to writing literature employing all dimensions of the word, with the freedoms and experiences we have gained or lost throughout life, wait patiently for their work to see the light of day. Meanwhile, political or historical texts are for sale, as if our people only had the right to read what someone determines to be politically correct.

When I discovered that the people who were going to take care of life on the beach were – at the same time – going to mistreat it, this seemed so paradoxical and unreal to me that I experienced some really difficult moments.

The smoke billows out of the apartments as if there were a fire burning in every home, as if nothing were more important than attacking the enemy. “The enemy” has been the driving force behind many things on the island. In this case the enemy is a mosquito: the Aedes egypti.

Many suffer from family stress, or from the poor quality of the food in certain diners for old people who have no family care. Some spend their days going back and forth from the market to the bakery, always alert to what has just come in to eat and standing in long lines to obtain the food.

A man who had been looking insistently at us noticed the photographer’s absence and commented to an attendant: “A woman with a big camera went in around this corner; I saw her. If you want, I can go in and look for her.”

I talked about the Cuban people’s resistance, their capacity to stoically withstand whatever comes along, just to keep us from falling. Falling to where, I wonder? Aren’t we already lying, curled up on the ground comfortably and quietly grumbling, letting others run our lives?

The wait for the turtles became unbearable. A jittery mood took hold of us when a hurricane approached on the horizon. Pinar del Río is a Cuban province with a special magnet for hurricanes and other harsh weather conditions.

We had heard the slogan “Resist and Overcome” again and again and again for many years. We have resisted hurricanes, enemy aggressions, torrential rains, droughts, threats, and financial crisis, both international and national.