The Permitted Christmas
HAVANA TIMES – Christmas in my childhood existed only as a reference from United States movies. Harsh winters, little trees laden with gifts and lights, the postcards my father sent from New York—designs of little angels and happy children, where snow was made of white brushstrokes and silvery dust. A magical, fascinating world that my sisters and I were forced to witness from afar, as if through a fogged-up pane of glass.
My mother always told us that Santa Claus did not exist, and we knew very well that any gift came from my stepfather’s work or from the sewing my mother did on her old and efficient Singer machine. In any case, there were no gifts during those dates—at most a special meal and the delicious homemade fritters.
At twenty, together with my first boyfriend, Christmas turned into evenings out at restaurants where it was still possible to pay with your salary. There was a festive atmosphere, full of expectations. People did not celebrate anything religious, but rather the imminent departure of the year and the secret hope that the next one would bring us prosperity and freedom.
In the early 1990s, one December 31st I went to Midnight Mass at the Cathedral of Old Havana. I remember that during the sermon the priest said, very emphatically: “Christmas here is forbidden, but no one can stop us from celebrating it in our homes. Find a pine branch and decorate it however you can—let no one take away that special happiness of the birth of the child Jesus…!”
At that moment I did not understand that, beyond gleaming, multicolored trees, Christmas is an energy in the air in which grudges dissolve, even if it is an illusion of benevolence. It is a reminder of how human beings could live (and live together). And even though it is a great inconsistency that this atmosphere of sweetness is mixed with dinners filled with animal suffering, people still feel lighter at heart, as if they were conceiving projects without malice. As if the world’s fast pace paused to allow a clean kind of progress—without arrogance, without competition, without mad or degrading struggles.
After Pope John Paul II’s visit to the Island in 1998, Christmas was finally decriminalized. For the first time, the image of Jesus Christ covered an entire wall on the façade of a building visible from Revolution Square.
For the first time, radio and television scripts could include the word “God” and other terms that had been demonized by a rigid, secular system. For the first time, Christian sermons were authorized on radio, and Good Friday was declared an official holiday. Dollar stores began selling dismantlable plastic Christmas trees and all kinds of holiday accessories.
Christmas began to invade us, with its subtle promise of a pleasant world without exclusions.
Meanwhile, the blinking lights hanging from windows and balconies gave away social status and spread the dream of a thwarted future—the shared pain of millions of Cubans. In his speech before the Island’s congregation, the Pope expressed that deep collective longing with exact words: “May Cuba open itself to the world with all its magnificent possibilities, and may the world open itself to Cuba.”
Twenty-seven years have passed. And in a country devastated by a pernicious, continuous corrosion, this Christmas promises to be particularly sad.
Separated families. Families united by a poverty that produces overcrowding and conflict. Emigrants who sold everything before leaving and return with frustrated plans for progress. Viruses, abuse, physical calamities… Long blackouts. Abusive prices even for bare essentials. The astonishing surrealism in which Cubans have always performed acrobatics to get by—to avoid crossing the line that puts them in danger, to avoid renouncing even the smallest vanity—tears at the seams and all its squalor showing.
In my community I have seen very few decorated houses, and the Pope’s message, turned into an omen, resounds as never before even in the exhausted imagination of children.
May Cuba be reborn for the new year, because we have crossed the limit—the one between illness and decomposition. Our resistance has reached the breaking point.
May statism be shattered by the force of life and common sense. For even though it is now allowed, we have not yet had a true Christmas in Cuba.
Read more from the diary of Irina Echarry here on Havana Times.