Correos de Cuba

By Veronica Vega

HAVANA TIMES – There was a knock at the door, I opened it, and was surprised to see a young man with a yellow postal package.

For years, decades, I hadn’t received anything through the mail service. It’s been a long time since I heard the whistle of any mail carrier, that sound that used to make my sisters and me jump in the 70s when a sealed envelope, impatiently torn open, a white envelope with two stripes on the edge: red and blue, indicated the sudden presence of our father, his flamboyant handwriting, and that world of enormous buildings and enchanting aromas, built in fragments (with photos and films), and called the United States. Sometimes the envelope included a postcard sprinkled with little angels and silver dust. Ah, Christmas! That other colorful and radiant universe that was forbidden to us.

In the 90s, receiving a yellow envelope could mean you had won the lottery (the visa lottery), and being selected would allow you to emigrate directly to the land of enchanted aromas. That’s how my younger sister left, and now she lives in Las Vegas (that city full of vibrant and unreal colors).

But this yellow envelope brought by the young mail carrier, I discovered with surprise, contained books. It was a selection made by my friend and colleague Lien Estrada, who took the trouble to send it to Havana from the province of Holguín. I felt moved and, like in childhood, I remembered how much of the sender’s intention is impregnated in the package. A goodness and tenderness are transferred with the weight of thought, feelings one no longer senses in this country where people only think about food, hygiene, medicine, the struggle not to be overwhelmed by a fierce despair anchored in the chest because it is the only thing guaranteed to us daily. The ghostly voice whispering “nothing will get better…”. Oh, as if we were outside all socioeconomic principles and even the laws of physics.

The gift from my friend doubly shook me because, as a writer, I confess that I have not been able to finish reading any book for a long time. Books about Cuba crush me with a dull pain I can no longer bear. Books about other realities find me wandering, my attention in regions I did not expect, while the story continues without me, page after page.

Sometimes I wonder if I have become too active, too dependent on concrete facts when I was always so idealistic. It is not that I am tired of the poetry that strikes me through the elements and the landscape. The breeze that comes through the balcony, the smell of salt penetrating the subconscious with the first memories of the beach.

The sight of my cats frolicking in an innocence that is a daily privilege amidst a panorama of abandonment and suffering (in the stampede, which is no longer an exodus, people sell their houses with everything inside and before leaving, they abandon their long-time pets… faithful and bewildered children who do not understand the absence, much less the betrayal). Then, I realize that I have not become too insensitive to the tenderness of a book of poems traveling through offices, journeying in the belly of a domestic plane for a young man with impeccable manners to bring it to my door.

No, it is that I am waiting, retracted in the resistance of that same tenderness, for the day when we can also be a country of enchanted aromas where it is possible to create, to found… A country that sends packages with postcards and happy photos. A country from which no one wants to leave.

A “Correos de Cuba” that dispenses not only books of poetry but also medicines, personal items, gifts that will not be looted by any employee trying to make up for their salary deficit.

Like Lien, who can select books of poetry and send them as a surprise to a colleague she has not yet met personally, I believe in the power of logic, of justice, in the objective limit of deterioration and exhaustion.

I believe in the power of love that sustains us despite the precariousness, the rapacity. Because people who participated in the peaceful protests of July 11, 2021, remember with nostalgia that people were so happy… And that they even helped each other. If someone was thirsty, someone would offer water; if someone wanted to smoke, another would offer a cigarette… Because there was a tangible synergy where the desire for collective freedom and prosperity vibrated. A collective dream is something very powerful. That’s why it was so simple. Like the flow of breath or the silent throb of blood.

Because there is nothing simpler than the truth, and one does not see it when a plant bursts through a crack in the pavement. Meanwhile, we ease the wait with all the tender acts possible. Whether respecting those who have given up, rescuing an abandoned animal, or sending books one has treasured to surprise someone who also resists in silence, somewhere else.

Read more from the diary of Veronica Vega here on Havana Times.