It’s just that in Cuba you develop – if you’re not a complete idiot – a sense to always look for the essential, which at the moment was to have a nice evening with my wife. I don’t know where that ability comes from to discern what is real within the mind-boggling shit one encounters when you’re so poor.
That magic sometimes occurs, but almost always, when we look back, we continue being the same people, only now eating McDonald’s quarter-pounders and wearing newer jeans. However, there’s another change occurring; now I see it more clearly.
After a war, one is be able to exercise judgment, but the Cuban individual remains on a war footing under the physical threat of being invaded by the United States, and under the ideological threat of the ideas of capitalism-so peacetime never comes.
The temperature was 2 degrees centigrade, the lowest temperature I’d experienced since arriving in Japan. I was in the town of Nagano, the place where my wife spent the majority of her early childhood and all of her school years up until the University.
To my astonishment (almost fright), when I looked at her I knew that this is where I should be. I still could not balance out the pluses and minuses, nor did I want to have to. Life is unfurling before me, and I’m living it. There are no stones in the path, or oases, just the regularities of the landscape.
The bus arrived on time, and I couldn’t believe that it took me to the hotel for free. I had some dollars but I didn’t change them in the airport because the signs didn’t clearly indicate where the places were, and everything was a bit narrow and strange to me.
In the airplane, to prevent the confusion that continued pursuing me, I began to recall how I had got there. It was in August 2008 that I met Yumiko, a Japanese woman who had made close contacts with my friends, who by then had emigrated to different countries.
My story was not one of a maladapted person in a happy world, but instead was complicated by being a maladapted person in a world that thousands did not want. I then decided that I too would certainly have to leave Cuba one day.
The next leap came when I finished my military service and decided to leave home to try life in the northeastern Cuban province of Holguin. My hope was that being in a province far from the capital, the competition in the art world would be less, and that perhaps I could develop my skills as a writer.
I believe there were some small jumps after my first leap, but I’m only going to talk about the big leaps that brought significant changes to my life. I’d say that the second big leap came after the decision not to go to junior high school (7-9th grades) at the school near my apartment in Reparto Eléctrico, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana.