Uncomfortable questions
MIAMI — Cuba is that way, someone said, pointing to the sea. We were standing at the exact point that marks the 90 miles that separate one shore from the other. A large fence blocked access to the water, as if to prevent anyone from entering or leaving from that site. An absolutely useless fence, at this stage of the game.
I approached it slowly and leaned my forehead against the bars. On the other side, the waves splashed the reefs with little enthusiasm, almost out of habit. And there, just beyond the horizon, the island supposedly lay, a spit of land in the middle of the sea. I tried to sigh, to appear moved, to do what is expected of one in such cases. But the truth is that I felt nothing.
I have never missed Cuba the proper way, at least not the way we were always taught. Although, in reality, the first thing you’re taught is that you never have to go away; the correct thing has always been to remain, like the stones and the trees.
Now then, if the departure were inevitable, by then I would have accumulated, often unconsciously, a series of pre-established mechanisms about how to miss properly, the same way you know what type of images should move you when you look at the TV or the expression you wear, like a transfixed animal, when you’re watching a classical ballet.
The problem is that I’ve always been suspicious of the unanimous visions of what it is to be Cuban, same as I was distrustful when someone came to talk to me about “the truth about Cuba.” Basically because such a thing — unique, singular, encapsulated in a roadside billboard — doesn’t exist.
There are as many truths, as many notions about what Cuba is, as there are individuals willing to feel them, no matter if they were born there or not, and yours is as valid as mine, so long as it doesn’t screw with me. They have a bit of anarchy and religious faith: at some point, all are right and at the same time all are wrong. What’s truly difficult is learning to coexist.
Let’s take, for instance, a classroom full of immigrants, Cubans mostly. The teacher asks them what it is that they miss the most about their homeland, what is it that makes it so special, in their opinion. The glow of the stars over the fields, says one. The clarity, the variety of the deep waters, the surrealist landscape of the bottom, says a diving enthusiast. Not having to work and getting up at eleven in the morning, says another.
Seated in a corner, a 50-something man, probably the oldest in the class, raises his hand. He tries to explain in English, as best he can, that he was a master cheesemaker. That he knew, just by smelling the milk, which container would make good cheese and which wouldn’t. That he could spend hours, whole mornings, inside the laboratory he had set up in his home, looking for the perfect combination of bacteria. That he knew the exact time for curing whatever type of cheese he needed to make. That his cheeses were the most famous in the seven surrounding towns, even in Havana.
To him, Cuba was the scent of a newly cured cheese when he cut it for the first time. That scent, impossible to describe, much less in English, evoked everything that he had ever loved in his life.
When my turn came, I wriggled uncomfortably in my chair, not knowing what to say. Although the question was not ill-intentioned, nostalgia is something that one should keep to oneself. Those inquiries incommode me almost the same as when people ridicule my past.
Yes, because that species also exists, the kind that tells you: welcome, finally you’ve arrived, your real life begins today, cling to the eagle and don’t let go, and under no circumstances look below.
I miss seeing the sea every morning, I finally said, once the silence became too dense. I lied. I like the sea but it has never seem indispensable to me. It’s more a fatality, something you assume as a medical condition or a callus in a foot: one day it appears, you discover it, become aware that it’s there and that you have to deal with it. That’s all.
To me, what makes Cuba special, is precisely the same that would make Ireland or Kiribati special to someone who was born there. Cuba is my grandmother’s voice singing boleros out of tune. The shadows projected on the wall by candles on a night the electricity went out. The pungent smell of iodine in a hospital. The ephemeral freedom provided by horses and bicycles. The park where she let me kiss her, under the stone gaze of Victor Hugo.
A bench overcrowded with young men, full of hunger and dreams, who end up sitting on the ground around a bottle. The same bench, one year later, with the same boys but with a lot less hunger and a lot fewer dreams. The Saturday night chair someone is still saving for me, while in the background sounds the voice of Fito Páez.
An evening in Havana, watching the old buildings from the tenth floor of an old building. Cuba is the moist embrace my mother gave me just before I left.
