Dreams Can Come True, Even in Cuba
HAVANA TIMES – There are magical moments when you feel the kindness of the universe as if struck by the force of a wave. It doesn’t knock you down, it just shakes you so you can truly perceive. And what once seemed impossible or out of reach is suddenly right there before your eyes. It feels like a dream. But it has the simple, undeniable clarity of real events. You just don’t yet understand how life dissolved the obstacles to make real what you had longed for, deep in your subconscious. Without admitting it. Without it even taking the form of a thought.
A family member I care about—someone who wasn’t born in Cuba and has never suffered its hardships—understood the tough public transportation situation here. And they decided to help us with the money needed to buy two bicycles. A delivery person brought them in boxes to our home, and my son assembled them in a few minutes. With no experience, just his innate curiosity and the push of necessity.
That night, neither of us slept.
I didn’t want to waste a second of that reality that had suddenly given us such an invaluable resource for happiness.
Because it’s not just about getting from place to place. It’s about reclaiming something that was taken from me years ago, the night my mother’s house was robbed, and part of the booty was my mountain bike.
I felt like a piece of me had been stolen.
Yesterday, I looked for an article I wrote for this site, where I expressed my longing for the times I rode through the streets on that bike, my child behind me, hugging my legs from the rack.
Reading it, I felt that the text had been a prayer. A message cast into the sea inside a bottle. Because our minds get overwhelmed by physical limitations and the calculations of their own logic. They leave no room for mystery. But what do we really know about why we sometimes “choose” one street over another, only to suddenly find, say, an abandoned and sick animal that another passerby would completely ignore? Or run into someone who gives you something essential? Or experience something that may seem trivial from the outside but inside triggers a flood of emotions. Who charts that invisible path on a precise map we don’t know, but that already exists?
I remember once, back in the 80s, walking through my Havana suburb of Alamar under a row of white oaks, and I saw an old man standing on the sidewalk. Another girl was walking ahead of me. The old man looked at her as she passed, said nothing. When I walked by, he raised his hand holding a flower from one of those oaks and said: “Take it, it just fell. It should bring you luck.” I took the flower and thanked him, deeply moved.
I wondered why he hadn’t given it to the girl before me. And I felt it like a caress from God, or from the divinity that lingers in the air, in my breath, in everything that exists. A kind of love message.
You wish you could record those moments so that when times of pain and confusion come, they could pull you out of the abyss in one tug. But as Neruda said: “Love is so short, and forgetting is so long…”
To test out the bikes, my son and I went to Bacuranao Beach at dawn. I can’t describe the happiness I felt when I started gliding downhill on that structure, whose perfect design was conceived so long ago! As old as childhood games, and yet so useful and reliable in a place like this, a country where getting around has become a serious problem.
I rolled and rolled… and the speed didn’t even let me pedal. I thought of birds soaring on the wind. I wanted to scream from joy. And when we crossed the Bacuranao bridge and again went downhill and saw the blue sea, I realized how short the distance feels when you don’t have to walk it.
It’s like entering a new circuit: you see other cyclists, motorcyclists, and—at the highest tier—cars.
Amidst them all, my bicycle, like a gleaming red bird, seemed perfect to me. Irreplaceable.
And we kept descending to the beach with that liberating feeling of power.
Yes, dreams are like seeds that germinate silently, in the dark. We don’t know which ones will reach the surface and break into reality. Today I know that the ones that do have a precise role in the fabric of our existence. And it’s up to us to make the most of the gift.