The Power of Memory
HAVANA TIMES – They say remembering is living again.
On rainy days like today I almost believe that when I open the door of my apartment, I’ll find the landscape that awaited me around the house where I stayed in 2011 in Saint Étienne, France. A city of discreet beauty that inspired Emile Zola’s novel Germinal, born from a miners’ strike.
First came Paris and that autumn I had imagined so many times, the Seine winding through a perfect stage, like scenery designed for a play.
Saint Étienne was more subdued; the atmosphere blurred the edges of objects as if I were being transported to another time.
Yes, there is no doubt that we can travel with our thoughts.
In my case, anyone would say it’s a form of auto suggestion, a way to escape the undeniable chaos that surrounds me here in Cuba. And it’s true. But remembering can also help us become aware of things we didn’t perceive while those very events were happening.
It happened to me too when recalling, through a photo, my first night in Salt Lake City, Utah, where my friend Fernando, whom I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, was waiting for me.
He said: “I’m going to take you to the Capitol,” and smiled mischievously, “Yes, because we also have one here.”
In front of the grand staircase, the magic of the night sky wrapped me, confronted me directly with space. As if a wind had swept through the entire city, all that remained was the night and me. That deep blue spoke straight into my ear, and the presence of millennia-old generations floated in the cold air, sharing my astonishment.
I struggled as best I could to keep him from seeing my tears, because I had no way to explain what I was experiencing.
When I think of the United States, it’s very hard for me to accept that such spiritual grandeur has been buried under such ferocious materialism, and where right now a violent political polarization is expanding. And yet, that purity is still there, in the ether, resisting social scandals and all their disasters.
In Saint Étienne I liked to go out in the mornings and feel what I called “the soul of the city,” and how it silently called to me.
It was a sensation like when you see someone pass by who feels deeply familiar, even though you can’t connect them to any specific memory.
The magic was in the trees, so different from those of the tropics, in the houses covered in ivy with every shade of autumn, in shady stairways that transported me to films from my childhood. In the toll of a church bell echoing from another era, in the pine forest I crossed in wonder with my friend Christian as the fog dissolved us…
The mist seemed like the threshold to that intangible realm described in fairy tales. Everything amazed me, and at the same time I realized it was too late for me. I would no longer be able to integrate into that beauty that exudes tradition, into the strict order of things, into the ruthless rhythm of the First World.
There is a time for that radical change that thousands of Cubans undertake by legal and illegal, often desperate and dangerous, means—tearing themselves away from their entire past, with all their strength.
I cannot. I’ve become too embedded in this merciless light, which reveals everything and keeps no secrets. I have fused myself with the sadness of this Island and its uncertain future.
When I returned from my visit to the United States in 2019, what pained me most was the thought that I had forever lost the majesty of the nights and that intimate connection with the immensity.
But then it happened. I was walking through Alamar with Yasser, on our way to the bus stop, when I looked up, and it was almost a blow that loosened my knees: for the first time I came into contact with Cuba’s starry sky. As if that night in Salt Lake City had returned, with all its might.
Then I was able to cry with happiness, even already seated on the bus and watching the darkness of a city with almost no streetlights slide past the window.
It was only a few months after the events of July 11, 2021. I had seen in dreams those crowds descending Prado Street, heading for the Malecon. And that night showed me much more than the stars: I could feel the pulse that vibrates beneath the apathy, the weariness, the apparent calm.
Cuba’s radiant destiny rolled up like a seed under this stifling state that seems to exclude us from the physical laws that drive evolution and progress.
“The event is underway,” said Exupéry. But time keeps its drab course, like that darkness beyond the bus window, while brutal reality corrodes us and draws us—whether we want it or not—into decadence.
Yet if we’re prevented from doing what we want, it’s always possible to do something good. And we can still save our individual humanity, the most sacred thing, the only thing we’ll take with us when we leave these bodies battered by so many forms of dysfunction.
Save ourselves morally, protect these minds dazed by the continual swing between hope and disappointment. Retreating into selective landscapes of memory as a bridge over this crisis that is devastating the country where we grew up and hoped to flourish together.
And one night, already written into the divine plan, Havana will be the magnificent city we dreamed of, overflowing with promises for the youth of that moment. Filled with lights, music, and laughter, a city that will also whisper to a visitor something only they will understand, profoundly moved. A city to wander without anguish, surrounded by that sea that will no longer be a fatality but an open road to the world.