I Also Miss Cuba While Living in It
By Eduardo N. Cordovi Hernandez
HAVANA TIMES – Part of this text was written by Fernando Ramos on April 23, 2023, on Facebook. It reflects exactly how I feel right now—and, I believe, how many others who still remain in Cuba feel as well.
I used to think that missing Cuba was something that only happened to those who left. Today I see that’s not true. I miss my country while living in it. Now I understand that the exact moment when you board a plane, cross a jungle, or risk your life in a boat is not when you actually leave. You leave long before that—when you begin to think about leaving, when you stop imagining a future in the place where you were born and have lived until now, when you stop wanting to grow old where your whole family and the families of your friends have lived.
Cubans leave, even when they can’t. Today I realize that Cuba is not simply a mound of land in the Caribbean Sea, nor a group of institutions, nor an ideology imported from faraway lands.
It is my family, my neighbors, my street corner, our peculiar way of thinking; it is joyful people, coffee, rum; it is talent and spirituality. And with each passing day, fewer of these things remain here. Scarcity tending toward infinity and senselessness becoming commonplace are sweeping everything away.
From this place where I now stand, everything that defined our Cuban essence is missing—everything. So much so that even the most basic things, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner, have become luxuries. And let’s not even mention water supply, which is normally scarce and sometimes fails entirely for weeks at a time. Even when there is water, it’s often not potable enough in the most densely populated cities.
Almost no one has matches. A small box of matches—if you can find one!—is outrageously expensive. I built myself an electric lighter by running a wire through a positive electrode in a plastic jar of saltwater, connecting the gas stove’s chassis to the metal water pipe to “ground” it. That way I didn’t need matches or rely on smokers’ lighters… but now even gas is impossible to get. I’ve stopped going to fetch it when it arrives. I can’t haul a gas canister on a cart, nor can I afford to spend a third of my pension paying someone to do it.
The fuel problem isn’t just about cooking—it’s also, of course, about transportation. The worst part is how this all starts to be normalized. And that’s when despair sets in. That’s when we begin to leave.
Every time someone you know leaves, it’s as if a piece of your life’s puzzle is taken away. You’re left hollow inside, soulless, unable to complete the picture. Voices fade away, hugs disappear, the hand on your shoulder, the familiar knock on the door, the unmistakable whistle, the street vendor’s call, they all vanish.
The positive routines of daily life fade out. Fewer and fewer familiar faces at birthdays, and so on. And each time, you laugh less than before. Missing—extrañar—has become a national feeling. Homes have turned into mere inhabited spaces, just walls holding up a roof. The sadness of the empty-nest syndrome, which thousands of parents and grandparents suffer, is contagious—anyone can feel it, touch it.
Today, every child born in Cuba is, in potential, an emigrant. Perhaps anyone reading this might think I’ve lost my love for my homeland. Wrong. The more it hurts, the more I love it.
“Pepe” (José Martí, in his early youthful writings) once wrote to his mother: “…love of one’s mother, of one’s country, is not the ridiculous love for the land or the grass our feet tread upon…”
How right he was! As a university professor recently said about patriotism: “…we cannot tie it exclusively to the idea of resistance… the homeland is the construction of a future, the realiization of dreams, collective achievements. The pride of being Cuban is not built only from references to that glorious past… We must break away from the idea of a narrow patriotism anchored solely to geography.”
And that’s exactly how it is.