A Friend Comes to Visit Me
HAVANA TIMES — I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad when a childhood friend who lives in another country tells me she’s coming to Cuba and wants to see me. The first reaction is joy, but once she’s here and I can’t even offer her a coffee or a meal, or buy her a small gift, it makes me terribly sad. It makes me feel like I’m not living as a human being, and I ask myself: why have I stayed to live in this country?
One of the reasons I’ve stayed is that this is the country where I was born, where my grandparents, my mother, my siblings, and my children were born; where my best friends were born, friends who are now scattered all over the world. Besides, I like my country and its people, the beauty of its nature and its sea. I feel very good here, like most Cubans I know who live in other countries: they like to come back and enjoy their friends and family despite everything we’re going through.
However, I see all my relatives and friends who suffer from a very strong nostalgia for Cuba and don’t adapt to living in other countries, despite having freedom and improving economically—as they themselves say—and having a decent life. That reminds me of Leonardo Padura’s novel Personas Decentes (Decent people), which I just finished reading; it’s very good and portrays our society. I recommend it.
When my friend visited me in March of this year, as soon as she arrived, she gave me a bag with little gifts. She is very kind and always brings incredible details, from a bar of soap to a package of coffee and some milk caramels to sweeten our souls.
Her visit made me incredibly happy. We talked endlessly and caught up. We laughed, we cried. She always tells me about the trips she takes in her country with her family to get to know other states and shows me the photos. I would love to give her many things and take her around my country, but we know that right now that’s impossible. Thanks to my manual skills, I gave her some crocheted earrings and other papier-mâché crafts, and a yarn hat—where she lives it’s very cold—and she went crazy over my gifts.
When she left, I burst into tears. I couldn’t stop, out of sadness that my friend brings me those little gifts with so much love and I have almost nothing to offer her—just a cup of coffee, and only because she gave it to me. It’s incredible that with my work I can’t buy those basic necessities with the money my own hands earn, because right now almost no one buys handicrafts—only food, just to stay alive.
Every day I have fewer friends here. When I go out on the street, I don’t recognize anyone anymore—a town where we all knew each other, even if only by sight, just by greeting one another. Today, in the streets you only hear: so-and-so left with their whole family. One day you stop seeing someone and they tell you they went to Peru! What a terrible thing—who would have told a Cuban that they’d go live in that country. I don’t mean to devalue any country; on the contrary, to visit Machu Picchu, the Inca city, and the land of Vargas Llosa, of course—but to live there, never. I’ve seen Cubans go live in countries that never interested them, just to flee this chaos.
Going back to my friend: this last time, when she told me she was coming, I had some old paint at home and gave the terrace—where we gather to talk—a quick touch-up. She really likes to help, and this time she brought medicines for a young man from the town she doesn’t even know, because she saw his mother’s request on Facebook. It was an antibiotic—he had been operated on and needed it urgently—and she delivered it personally. That’s how incredibly good my friend is.
She’s an example of a Cuban who would like to live here. She confesses that she feels so good that she doesn’t want to leave. When we walk around town, she enjoys the sun; she says she loves to sweat, and she also misses the smell of the sea. We are island people, and on continents we can feel out of place. Where she’s lived since the 1990s, the sea is eight kilometers away and it’s always cold; even in summer, in the afternoons she has to bundle up.
Now, this month of December, she wanted to come again and I asked her, please, not to come—because of the virus outbreaks and the general garbage situation. Luckily, she listened and won’t come. She’ll leave it for the new year, which makes me very happy, because if she caught this virus, for her—she suffers from arthritis—it could be fatal.
Now I have more time to finish a yarn scarf I’m knitting for her. And I hope that by the time she comes things in this country will have changed and won’t be as ugly as they are now; that is my hope.