Ro-Ro the Frog Was Singing, Ro-Ro Beneath the Water…
By Eduardo N. Cordovi Hernandez
HAVANA TIMES — In recent days a series of events have taken place around the world that seem like circumstances preparing certain changes to finally materialize. It’s what some people call “cause and effect”; others call it karma, and others use different names.
Meanwhile here, some friends said to me in our sidewalk chats that “sometimes everything seems to freeze,” as if “nothing happens for a while and, all of a sudden, everything starts moving at once—sometimes for worse and sometimes for better.” It does seem that way, but I believe those kinds of things are always happening. What really happens is that we just don’t know about them. And at the same time, it is also true that the world seems to stop for quite long stretches. Not only that! It can also seem like it moves in reverse.
For example, in Cuba, Time—not the atmospheric or environmental kind, but as a physical dimension—seemed to stop in 1959. And from the perspective of the nine-year-old boy I was, my memories of that “Back Then” are of having lived a marvelous historical moment, despite the reluctance, suspicion, or distrust of my parents, rural folks from the interior of Havana province, perhaps with little time living in the capital or maybe, because they were no longer young, already seasoned by experience. Something that, “at this point in the game,” I consider to have been a stroke of luck for me.
The thing is that from then on, the events that had seemed marvelous began to look more like something that could no longer be recalled. They were things that had always lived in the unreal zone of hopes, longings, and the future. And although they remained beautiful, they vanished from sight into the years ahead.
On the other hand, the present moments, the ones that slowly become the Past and do remain trapped in memory, were not exactly pleasant to remember. And the issue, I believe, is not that time stops, but rather that people don’t want it to keep passing. That’s when one becomes aware of the backward movement and begins to need something to happen. Something that, as Silvio sang, “wipes everything away.” One begins to wish for something, anything to happen: “a blinding light, a shot of snow,” or simply “a wisp of cloud.” And following the poet’s words: so as not to keep seeing so much of the same thing, not to see it forever.
And this is terrifying, because in passing we also commented that things here may be happening to us like the frog in the experiment. The frog which, in a jar of water placed over a flame, stopped feeling the water as cold. Soon it felt pleasantly warm. After a while it was deliciously tepid. Until it began to get hot. Then, once hot, it began to bother the frog, but it decided to wait a bit longer before jumping out—and when it finally realized it had to leap, it was already too late and it died scalded.
Read more from the diary of Eduardo N. Cordovi here on Havana Times.