Why I Celebrate Mother’s Day in Cuba

By Helson Hernandez

HAVANA TIMES, May 7 — The second Sunday in May is Mother’s Day, at least in my country – Cuba.  I say this because I also have dear mothers in Argentina, but their date is celebrated in October.  What a coincidence, because — regardless of the month — the observances take place in springtime on both halves of the Earth.

Maybe you didn’t notice it, but springtime is moist, like your eyes whenever you remember your mother if she’s no longer close to you, or simply when she’s with you but perhaps not like you would like, or maybe because your eyes are so sensitive like the very act of love and they become moist simply from the emotion of seeing her or thinking about her.

Also, spring allows us to see its most beautiful expression in flowers.  These almost always flourish in this epoch.  Perhaps it’s because they wait anxiously for someone to choose them with the idea of their being the most natural and sincere gift for that person’s mother.

In short, mothers can have one day, but we have them for an entire lifetime – from when they support us in their stomachs and give all of their force so that we see the light of day… How then could one not congratulate all of you mothers, my older and younger friends, or you yourselves who hold that status?

I express my thanks to life, which has given me so much; but more than anything it has given me wonderful people, some closer, others farther away, all with their defects and with their virtues, but they are the ones that I chose, or that life chose, to share my existence.

Therefore you cannot ignore a day like this, one in which we scream with more energy than during the rest of the year “Congratulations Mother!”   You holler this because she was the one who gave you the possibility of arriving, of knowing the friend that you have today, of loving the mate at our side.

I say congratulations mothers because they brought into the world all those beings that I know today and who support me in my difficult days, in my madness as well as in my moments of pleasure and happiness…

I know there will be those who today cannot see their mother to celebrate her physically, but she will in fact be with us, even if we might doubt it for an instant, because she lives in the blood that pumps through us, in our souls, in each image of our memory.  How could she not be with us, if we bear in each part of us her eternal traces.