What the Wind Brings Us
HAVANA TIMES – The blackouts have returned in Cuba, apparently to stay. Ever more frequent and random, they shatter the announced schedules, causing frustration and chaos. At times like that, with the fan stopped, any breeze that decides to blow in receives our heartfelt thanks.
Even if the gusts become invasive, knocking over objects, slamming doors, slowing down the cooking process.
Even if my cats get upset, leaving me even more dazed with their games and mad dashes, at least there’s the relief of a temperature change, and an appreciation for the advantage of living on the upper floors.
I remember one time when I was walking with a friend in Alamar, and we stopped under an an enormous pine tree, whose branches at that moment were shaking in the wind. My friend asked me where I’d like to live, and without thinking I answered: “In a place where it’s always very windy.”
There’s no doubt that certain wishes come true.
From my first nights in this apartment, I was mesmerized by that strange and sinister whistling that wants to filter in through the cracks in the blinds. Like an errant and anxious soul in search of peace.
When the gusts go on for days, it seems like we’re aboard a boat on the high seas. During the hurricanes, I’ve come to believe that the forces that control those blasts are demonic hordes.
However, they say that air represents the spiritual element related to our breathing and the life force. It’s called Wayra.
It connects us with our mental body. It’s a living, conscious being, and one of the fundamental principles of earthly life: it marks the beginning and end of existence, as well as its rhythm.
San Francis of Assisi spoke with the wind and call it “brother;” he was also able to communicate with fire and other elements. I’ve read of human tribes capable of invoking the winds through spells and using them to defeat their adversaries in war. I don’t know if that’s true.
I’ve also heard that the function of the wind is to change the human mentality.
And I wonder if – as happens with the combinations in the positions of the stars – the radical social transformations begin under the effect of specific climatic events.
If I were to judge by that idea, I would be convinced that something strange is in the process of being born these days in my country. You can feel the tension in the air, the pain transformed by force to resistance.
Part of that national pain came to the surface with the university students’ reactions to the new and draconian prices for internet use.
Even though the students’ demands didn’t bear fruit, nor did the faculty strike that was called (we all know why), the atmosphere continues to be charged with tension and sadness.
What does that wind know – that wind that crosses through my apartment as if in a tunnel, and, in the same way, filters into all the houses it meets on its path?
What has it heard in the intimacy of the homes, where emotions are at last set free, and the rage can be expressed in direct words?
Because there’s a tacit shared discontent amid the dense quiet.
In each quota of imposed darkness amid so many setbacks: the implacable heat, the lack of rechargeable lanterns, the food that was left half-cooked or that spoils for lack of refrigeration (that food that costs so much more than any salary can pay for). And everything that was halted against the individual or family’s will… The discomfort grows stronger and explodes in the clanking of the pots here and there.
People bang their empty pans as a catharsis to vent desperation. Sometimes they also throw rocks onto the roofs of garages.
And those sounds carry through the air. Yes, the wind symbolizes freedom of being. The vision from on high – from the Supreme Consciousness. It’s the natural movement of life, and as such, also means change.
In Cuba, my generation and those that followed grew up believing that nothing ever changes; that we’re excluded from the world, the natural laws, and even from our own era. It’s a concept rooted in the psyche, a state of suggestion.
A few days ago, my husband and I were riding our bicycles up the Alamar hill when a gust of wind stopped us cold, picking up leaves and the pods of a River Tamarind tree and churning them into a convulsive spiral. I felt like I wasn’t standing before Something, but rather standing before Someone.
We can ignore the air, until it manifests itself with intensity and violence, waking us up with an impressive demonstration of power.
We’re so insignificant and fragile before the force of the elements!
How many times throughout history has a similar force, little known and unexpected, shaken the social foundations of a country?
The most immutable phenomenon – the mountains, the oceans and the rivers – have seen so much of the pretentious human progression.
Nothing established will remain forever, even If the transformation is slowed with every kind of trick.
Divine law is the Law.
And while I pick up the disaster left by the wind on my balcony, the flowerpots of the overturned plants, the dirt scattered on the ground, I breathe, look at the far-off sea, right now blackened and announcing a storm. And I think about that vision I had years ago, of boats flooding the horizon, with voices that could be heard clearer and clearer, with laughter, joy and reconciliation. Breaking the curse, the circle that isolates us in this hypnotic bubble of silence.
Read more from the diary of Veronica Vega here on Havana Times.