Malecon: Cuba’s Wall of Lamentations

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–Meet my Malecon seafront, the borderline where another reality begins. The wall of lamentations, the beginning and end of illusions. Outlet for sorrows and joys, frustrations and satisfactions. Towel for tears, recipient of the good and the bad.

Incubator of monsters engendered by our collective semen and the ancestral sludge from centuries of ships and blood from failed intents at conquest. The root of sunstrokes and pneumonia acquired in the utopic intent of spearing the fish that gather in the mind-addling torpor at the heated edge.

Cosmopolitan fish, travelers, that let themselves be fished for some hours and take away with them the memory of a pauper’s sweat, a sweat sickened by alien smells, craving the fatuous yellow warmth and enemy of the honorable intent to obtain it.

Master of ceremonies to the stars, the best audience for nights of amnesia and beginnings, baptized over and over again by sacred streams of spiritual and profane liquids, and trained in the tuneless song of cut-up nylon strings and hoarse throats.

A welcome concrete mattress for the day’s shipwrecked, for the life that comes with the blinding light of pulverized walls and roof pocked with holes. A line of blind concrete built on camera flashes of every possible quality, silent protagonist of hundreds of thousands of aborted inspirations in every possible format, in every possible language. This is my Malecon. Come to it and try to make it yours, try to let it reach out to you.