A Meeting of Friends in Holguin, Cuba
HAVANA TIMES – I’m visiting the pastor Niuvis Pernas at her home, when a friend of hers arrives – Professor Flor Maria Gandol. We introduce ourselves. She’s a professor of psychology at Holguin University. She’s 80 years old and tells me her teaching journey encompasses a full 60 years. First as a Biology teacher for 30 years; then later she studied Psychology and dedicated her last 30 years to giving classes on that subject. She still works. In other words, she’s spent an entire lifetime in education.
I congratulate her on her life’s work teaching. She’s a very cordial and expressive person.
Our friend Niuvis decides to make coffee, and we begin talking about something that’s been hitting us hard for several months now, the blackouts. This reality has totally changed the rhythm of our lives for the worse, possibly more than we can ever know. Because it’s affected our very character.
The Professor tells us that no one in her house had ever cooked with charcoal before, but right now they were needing a lot of effort in trying to do so. Without propane or electricity for stoves, they’ve had to begin using a makeshift barbeque that uses charcoal. But that’s a hellish situation, she tells us.
Niuvis comments that if it doesn’t light, maybe they have to let it “breathe.” She suggests they mount the charcoal container on two cement blocks, so the air can circulate and maintain the fire. The Professor thanks her and says she’ll do that, because her husband goes into ventilator “mode,” fanning air onto the fire with some palm leaves, but without achieving much. Niuvis continues offering additional instruction, since she found herself in the same sorry situation before, and these methods brought her some success.
That expression – “without achieving much” – brings me to reflect on the reality many Cubans on the island. That sensation of investing your greatest effort: in your studies, at work, in the home, in society.. and yet that feeling of “not achieving much” stuck in your heart. You can obtain a good job, graduate with good grades, give the best of yourself; but sadly, a greater external force prevails, product of the authorities’ bad decisions, for example. This brings you to experiment enormous frustration, and can impede your personal development.
Not to go too deep into something a cousin, now in the United States, commented to me once. He said: “Here, you sacrifice to have a small air conditioner, a hot shower, a certain level of comfort, and every six hours there’s a blackout for who knows how long, and all of that disappears as if you never had it.”
We finished our coffee, conversing about yet another challenge: How to get some cooking gas? The Professor said that she was also trying this. The Pastor, a woman of 83, remarked that she’d been included a while back in the group of people considered vulnerable, due to her age, and they helped her buy a cylinder of propane gas. The Professor said she’d go ahead and fill out that paperwork, because it was no longer as easy to obtain as it was before.
It really seems pitiful to me that every time we women or men get together in this country, we have to talk about the same topics. Because almost all of us are affected by the same catastrophic situation. In this case, the only topic we missed touching on was the massive emigration – to Miami, before; then to Spain; now to anywhere in the world. We aspire only to free ourselves from the homeland that’s now become an unbearable place to live.
Even with all these problems, we parted in good spirits. God help us, we’re optimists after all. And we’re glad for that. Because facing the Cuban present – where no one tells us about a solution in the short or medium term, nor do we feel we will find one, it’s plenty difficult, and you need just that: a lot of optimism. Despite everything.