Trapped in an elevator in Havana
Nobody moved. They looked like those live statues that adorned those picturesque colonial plazas of the city. People generally think that, if they remain immobile, they do not run the risk that the contraption will collapse and all its passengers plunge to their deaths.
Not even a soothing joke by the Venezuelan settled them down, much less provoke a smile. The Vietnamese, famous for their calm and patience, studied every nook and cranny of what had become a punishment cell, possibly to find an escape route. The Spaniards, without the possibility of simultaneous translation, kept repeating “puta suerte, jodé” [“fucking bad luck, goddammit”], while the Russian uttered a speech that no one understood except Yuri.
The Cuban, as is usually the case in any joke involving various nationalities, tried to invoke calm with that typical message of “easy, everyone, a solution is at hand”.
Just when those present began to feel a lack of oxygen, that thing began to move with its characteristic parsimony. The faces began to light up with the first smiles. A short, but seemingly unending trip, despite the fact that the hotel only has ten floors.
After reaching the ground there were hugs, bows and handshakes among the improvised kamikazes. If they all did not rush to the hotel bar it was because they had other urgencies and obligations, or because no one wanted to pick up the bill.
We leave to the imagination of the reader, in the hypothetical case that it became necessary to boost each of the passengers through the safety hatch, what would have been the order of that forced descent from that elevator. The only one missing was an American although, according to Yuri, the spirit of Barack Obama and his entourage during that memorable visit to the island in 2016 was present.
I would have loved to hear the Vietnamese version of the story.
