The Hands of a Cuban Woman
HAVANA TIMES – Yamila can’t fall asleep without first planning the next day’s routine. It’s a habit she picked up since becoming a housewife. Even though lately daily life has become unpredictable, she still does it.
She washes clothes, cooks, cleans the house, tends to her small business, and since she has a good imagination, she even finds time for herself. Satisfied, she feels her body relax, in spite of the mosquitoes and the heat, sleep comes to finally release the exhaustion built up over the day.
The sound of the alarm wakes her up early. She opens her eyes; if there’s electricity, she jumps out of bed without spending much time on getting ready.
She sets up the washing machine, and while the clothes are going through, she sorts rice and beans, makes coffee, serves a woman who came to buy some cassava fritters, and pulls out more clothes. She keeps moving without slowing down because she has to take advantage of the electricity. Later she’ll rinse and hang the clothes out in the sun.
“Get ahead, get ahead” is the only phrase in her mind. She still must process two pots of cassava—her husband helps with that—but she needs to fry them and package them before the power goes out again.
Everything seemed so easy lying in bed, work flowed, time was abundant, but her reality, and that of many Cuban women, is something else entirely.
No matter how fast she moves, the silence of the washing machine signals the power outage has returned. The rice didn’t finish cooking—if she doesn’t act fast, it’ll turn out hard. Run to the wood stove!
That’s where another nightmare begins. The smoke wraps around her body, clings to every strand of hair, seeps into her airways, and makes her cough.
“I’m ashamed to show my hands,” she tells me. “It’s sad to hand my husband a cup of coffee with these fingers stained with charcoal, wrinkled and lacking a manicure. There’s no point in fixing myself up if I wake up and go to bed covered in soot, even in my soul, just to feed my family.”
“And even if I tried, I couldn’t keep them without blemishes, just like I can’t keep my hair smelling nice with that conditioner that cost me so much to buy. In the end, I go to bed next to my husband smelling like firewood. It’s not fair, for me or for the other women who are aging just like I am.”
“This is madness!” she says. “Though maybe madness is dreaming that one day I’ll have a normal life.”
“Cuba stains,” wrote a well-known poet from Pinar del Río on his Facebook wall a few days ago. Yamila’s story is not an isolated case, it’s a reality shared by that Cuban woman who “gets up each day to wrestle with a country that stains her hands. A country that’s left her with no options.”
“…this is Cuba,” the poet continues in his post. “A Cuba that barely survives and stains beneath the official images… It doesn’t matter if you stayed in Cuba, if you went to Miami, or anywhere else in the world: the island drags along, it follows you wherever you go. It weighs. It stains. It hurts wherever you go.”
I’m concerned, what is her husband doing while she is running around so busy??