The ‘Tearyport’: Slippery when wet

Tenerife-Madrid-Havana –Guanajay

By Aurelio Pedroso

HAVANA – The reader should not think that I pretend to be an expert in airports when I say that I’ve been in many of them, all with different characteristics. From the most solemn, like Barajas and the two Parisian airports to those built in wartime by the Russians in the so-called African Horn, which amounted to a few hundred yards of land cleared of bush and debris.

What I wouldn’t doubt – and might even propose for the Guinness record book – is the fact that more people weep and shout in our Cuban airports than anywhere else in the world. Examples: terminals 2 and 3, at José Martí International Airport.

Christmas and New Year’s Day, a week off everywhere for the lucky people who have a job, a return to the homeland, to the family, to the everyday hassle that we Cubans know and that some foreigners living in the island relate to others as the way people live and understand (or don’t understand) this country. A trip that often goes from the routine to the absurd, to that magical realism that is as surprising as the stories from our Latin American Macondo.

 “Tell them to greet me with tamales,” was the clear and precise message from a young man who, after a 12-year absence, was returning from the Canary Islands. He arrived with his wife and two children, all Cubans. They were greeted not only with tamales but also with an old 1952 Chevrolet truck that made the trip from the town of Guanajay, about 40 kilometers from Havana, carrying 12 members of the family, among them the couple’s parents.

Exceptional eyewitness of the arrival was the first member of the family who spotted the visitors enter the main hall after clearing Customs. It was like seeing the orchestra conductor lowering his baton and hearing he oboe begin its wailing. The shouts and cries were worthy of the soundtrack of a movie that illustrates the apocalypse, the end of the world.

It was a tragicomedy of the most pathetic and simultaneously laughable type, depending on whether we see the glass full or half-full. An avalanche of tears resembling Niagara Falls, so sudden and vigorous that they immediately puff up people’s eyes and turn them red, as if by magic. Weeping that is not practiced while in the plane but emerges with such force and naturalness that other people not in the clan are touched and try to conceal tears that roll down their cheeks.

But the emotion does not stop there. Consider, too, the forceful hugs that can empty the air from people’s lungs or send someone to a doctor with a rib cracked by a choreography of love extracted from a bout of wrestling or one of those Kung-Funtations in Chinese or Japanese temples.

The weeping doesn’t stop; the noses don’t stop running. When the group gets together among the many other greeters (more in number than the airplane’s passengers) the shouts drop in volume and we hear an expletive or two as a synonym for happiness and family reunification. Once the emotions calm down, come the snacks and people talk about health, the presents they bring for this relative and that one. There are comments about beauty, some jokes are cracked and the visitors inquire about the food that awaits them at home, such as croquettes, guava pastries, quimbombó or the tamales that were requested in a previous e-mail.

This is not only a culinary nostalgia but also a nostalgia of identity, which is stronger. It’s the nostalgia we feel the most when we leave the island and year after year are separated from our customs and habits, not to mention the many other things we left behind when the family was united, almost always in harmony.

Although in the case of Cuba I disagree with the first verse of that wonderful song by León Gieco titled “I Only Ask God,” I have often sung, out of tune and almost in silence, the verse that says. “Hopeless is he who must leave / to live in a different culture.”

Someday this will be part of history, for better or for worse, an expression as Cuban as those tamales. Maybe there will still be weeping, hugs and shouts but the reason will be very different from today’s.

There’s the Chevrolet truck that some foreigners have caressed and photographed lovingly. Two police officers have permitted the driver to park temporarily to pick up luggage and passengers, who climb aboard via a small ladder on the rear right and sit on broad wooden benches on the truck’s bed. The laughter and sobbing continue as the truck heads for nearby Guanajay.