By Veronica Vega
HAVANA TIMES – Winter is leaving us in Cuba, and once again, the illusion of a noticeable change in seasons. That idea of what real cold is like, enough to take out coats from the closet, boots (if we have them), imported or inherited scarves or shawls, who knows since when.
And then walking through Vedado, the strong wind in your face as you go down 23rd Street, looking at the Malecon down below, the waves breaking and exceeding the wall’s limit, reaching the street, leaving their trail of water and foam. For a moment, we believe we’re in another country. Cleaner, more beautiful, more romantic…
Because the relentless clarity of the tropics and the heat leave no room for glamour or nostalgia.
But more and more, Havana shows the shamelessness of neglect that squeezes the heart, and one quickly resorts to the trick of changing the view. Or to that other infallible one: escaping through memory.
Then I remember the mockery of my friend Fernando, who adapted to the climate of Salt Lake City and was already walking without a coat there, when I accompanied him to a rock concert. The noise inside the venue was so oppressive that I decided to leave, and outside, on the terrace, the freezing air, plus the spring waters carrying snow from the mountains, also became unbearable. I decided to go back inside and put pieces of damp paper in my ears to muffle the piercing sound of the music.
The experience of cold, like hunger, is an unforgettable feeling. That’s why my first real winter in Paris in 2011 flashes in my mind, when I was strolling on a boat on the Seine with some friends.
That horrible numbness in my hands and feet, even though they were covered. What will the snow be like, I thought, I don’t want to know. There’s nothing sweet or romantic about this. Frozen jaws bite at the base of your back, and by instinct, you contract, and the tension spreads, and it hurts. The photos and fake smiles to show off having been in a famous and perfectly foreign city, perfectly strange.
So, what can you say about your own city (the one where you were born and have always lived), if little by little it has become so unknown that you don’t know how to reconnect it to your insides? Maybe like a child watching their mother physically and morally fade, in a silent corrosion that doesn’t understand emotions, tears, or logic…
Each winter closes a cycle and starts a new and forced reconstruction of dreams, because the human need to trust in tomorrow is stronger than any experience, past or present.
I think the Hindus call it thâna (thirst for life), and it’s a kind of obsession, a clinging to hope, like the one that held the Jews in Auschwitz and holds the Palestinians in Gaza.
That recycled innocence, day after day, year after year. Forget or edit because thinking about a true Cuban winter evokes that horrible one of 2010, when my beloved cat Shining died, only wanting to warm herself on the backyard wall before falling into a vertical that had no return.
A month before, around 50 elderly people had died of hypothermia at the Mazorra psychiatric hospital. At least according to reports from foreign media like the Miami Herald. The official information here was cautious and filled with the usual euphemisms. However, even photos of the corpses in the morgue leaked. Photos that circulated from flash memory to flash memory, (because we were still offline), and that heap of emaciated bodies, so defenseless in their nakedness, was a direct blow to the eyes, and to the soul.
I’ve never been able to feel intense cold in Cuba without feeling distressed for the street animals and without remembering those images.
The seasons are hallways that dye everyday life with renewed shades. Simpler people may not even notice them while they are stunned by all the possible forms of concupiscence. Ah, sex, alcohol, drugs, dancing, scandal…
In this endless waiting, where life slips away (and that of our children and grandchildren), the most sensitive sink into the infinite mazes of the mind, where memories alternate with the present, mixing and confusing in such a way that you no longer know if you are really in Cuba or somewhere else. And thus, you can keep enduring until a true Change surprises us with that physical force that no longer allows any doubt. That sweeps you away, finally, with the relentless violence of events.
Read more from the diary of Veronica Vega here.
