Goodbye and good luck. See you soon.

HAVANA – “You understand that our friendship is unique in this world?” I ask, knowing the answer. In defining moments like these, which turn your life upside down, it seems right to explain the obvious. And this sounds definitive. Alejandro has decided to go live in another country, and thereby, vacate that space he inhabits in my life.

“Of course,” he answers.

“Nobody can show up at my doorstep at one in the morning and request a cup of coffee.” He knows…

And answers, “Nor will anyone call me over at nine in the morning to help paint walls or load a pallet.” We laugh like we always do.

“You better not,” I answer as my trembling hand brings the cigarette to my lips and (it must be the smoke which produces the tears) makes my eyes water.

When Alejandro was given a single-entry U.S. visa, he knew what was about to happen. It is one of those things in Cuba that although hardly mentioned, or put into words such as, “I am leaving,” they are there. They’ve always been there.

Living in these times produces vertigo. “Emigration is like water: you stop the leak here and the water flows there. When it is enthroned, as is the case of Cuba, one way or another, it exits.” So says the sociologist and essayist Antonio Aja as was expressed in the Master’s thesis of my colleague Ailyn Martín Pastrana. Migratory waves are what scholars call the fact that the country bleeds many of its citizens — fundamentally young people, women and professionals.

The most recent “wave” is known as the Route of the South, although Alejandro leaves on a direct flight that lasts not much more than an hour.

Beginning in 2016, the estimates of Cubans residing in other countries calculated by the Directorate of Consular Affairs and of Cubans Resident Abroad (DACCRE) were more than 2.4 million people, 84 percent living in North America. At the beginning of 2019, there will be, surely, at least six more from my own circle of friends.

He turns the conversation on me and asks, “What I fail to understand is why you don’t look for a scholarship and take off too.”

*****

“I’ve been thinking about how to tell you for days.” Elena tells me quickly, painfully. “If in 2014 we thought it was time to stay, to work and participate in what was to happening in the country (the thaw!), now everything seems to scream that it is time to leave.”

Contrary to what happened in 2015, months after Raúl Castro and Barack Obama announced the restoration of relations between Cuba and the United States, when thousands of Cubans decided to emigrate — a figure that exceeded the 2014 figure by 78 percent 4, we decided to stay to live and participate in the changes occurring in Cuba.

She, who has moved six times over a two year period into different rental apartments in Havana, is running out of savings that would be used in who knows how many years to buy her own place, then to travel the world, and later to plan for a family. Elena plans on returning, but in reality she has nowhere to return to. I wish mine could be a place where she can return to, but I know very well that it would not be enough. The only thing we have not shared in life since we met is blood, just by the mere accident that our mothers and fathers are not the same.

I can not help thinking about it. The statistics in these cases are irrefutable: How many professionals who go study in another country return? Certainly some, but in my experience they end up sick, of absurdity, or what is the same, deranged. If someone knows differently, I’d like to hear about it. Seriously…

Saying that you will return just when you decide to leave may be something you wish for, maybe a patriotic desire if you like, but it can also be the excuse that convinces you to make the decision once and for all. Because there is a very simple reason for not wanting to leave, and it is wanting to stay. And there is also a very simple reason why, in spite of that, you decide to leave (temporarily, for a few years, to oxygenate, to learn, as you may explain it), and that is that the country pushes you out; it is constantly throwing you out.

One should not have to fight against his or her own country to live in it.

*****

“What I’d like is a better way to move around the world. A residence in the United States can be one way,” I tell myself, talking about having access to exit doors, and a word that is as scarce as detergents, chicken or flour: options.

I think you could also marry a gringa, a Spaniard, or even a Martian, for that matter, someone who does you that favor. He could also stay, if he had reason to, I think. But his motives have left, one by one, even before him. His family and most of his group of friends (which in his case is more or less the same thing) is today transnational. Once in a while you have to reinvent yourself.

The worst part of this is to keep quiet, because they have unquestionable reasons: it is his own life that is at stake, a decision in which neither governments, nor family, nor friends can intervene. The second most terrible thing is to think of whom I could dream of the country we want if all these pieces of mine are leaving. A legion of strangers who may also end up leaving does not make me feel comfortable. In fact, it makes me feel nothing.

Looking over Ailyn’s thesis, I note that the sociologist Edel Fresneda points out a very strong and intuited tradition: between 20 and 30 percent of the Cuban population born after 1961 has emigrated. I can now say that I understand in which group and what statistics my friend falls under, and all the others, but honestly it does not help at all.

Before boarding his plane, his father gave him a Cuban flag. “The flag I carry here,” he told him, pointing to his chest. But when he opened it, he exclaimed, “Oh my, but it’s beautiful, let me see where I might hang it.” These were his father’s gifts before crossing the most overused 90 miles of the hemisphere — a flag and one piece of advice: “Be brave, sincere and fair, no matter the price.”

Scholars, of whom I am always thankful for, do not serve as consolation either: They discover strange things. Like the fact that in the last 15 years, between 20,000 and 46,000 people have emigrated from Cuba every year, or that this trend is going to be maintained because the motivations to emigrate remain intact. Antonio Aja, María Ofelia Rodríguez, Rebeca Orosa and Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos wrote in an article published last year in the magazine Novedades de Población, for example, that at least until 2030 the flow of farewells will continue and even increase. Until 2030…

The farewells, by the way, have become another national sport. That’s where you now find the medals Cuba no longer wins in baseball and volleyball. And they will probably be won by the elderly who remain without remedy, those who cannot sustain a decent life simply with a well-earned and well-deserved retirement.

That (yes, I’m changing the subject, because after all, I’m still here), is a more urgent issue than the fact that people choose to live outside the Island and that the public policies of our country do not imply a huge billboard welcoming them to become part of the future.