Leonid Lopez’s Diary

I have always been a peaceful person. My teachers took a while to remember that I was part of their class and the other students to notice my presence. However, underneath that person in the shadow there was a restlessness that began as a child and until this day I can’t name.

We lived in a well earned and well fenced-off paradise. Maybe that’s why we didn’t demand too much from others, who were already a copy of youself. It was easy to find a partner who would want to go through life together with us.

Riding the bus from my neighborhood on the outskirts of the city to the central neighborhood of Vedado, I noticed a billboard concealed by small trees. The sign has remained unaltered since my childhood, except for a bit of wear.

People are always searching for salvation in their future. Liberty is one of the names we give this goal, this final stopping point. Art can be viewed as a river down which you flow, guided by its course. Its waters that wrap around you, pushing your body into a whirlpool until you drown, is at the same time an elixir that saves you. Utopia is that dream of resurrection…

I still want to believe that my body isn’t this island limited by the waters: to believe that 34 years in one land without a passport to anywhere doesn’t limit my vision.

Grand plans disguise small dreams that end up forgotten or censored like the evils of old. The hope of glory doesn’t have to rule out the desires of the moment which accumulate like snowballs on a mountain.

Today is like any other day, in which for some reason I am thinking about my deceased mother. I’ll never know if I could have loved her more. That’s what death is about: never more. Our affection is appraised and proven through a series of symbolic events: unselfish devotion, the desire to understand the other, the sacrifice of personal interests…

What can I say that doesn’t seem deaf or blind? What path can I take where I don’t feel like an invalid? I hesitate to affirm anything because I have a negligible access to information.On the other hand, I can say without a doubt, that all of the Cuban media pass on the same discourse with the same take.

I have never kept a diary. A slogan of my adolescence was: experience isn’t saved in words. It was my unconscious reaction against the scientific thinking that tries to record everything. By 34 you stop defending your ideas with such hardness and in its place prefer to build noisy supermarkets or peaceful nature reserves.