Cuba stagnated with Castros

Cuba stagnated with Castros
Travels in the island nation gave a journalist family contacts to
cherish and a sense of loss to lament
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By Carlos Frias
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Updated: 7:40 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009

Epilogue:

I stare at Cuba every morning.

Before I do any work, I look out at Havana from high above the prison
walls that encircle the fortress on the bay where my father was held
prisoner for two years for simply wanting to leave the island some 40
years ago.

I can see clear across the Bay of Havana from this vantage point, from
the great stone statue of Christ and the puffing smokestacks of
factories, to the curving sea wall — El Malecón — twisting its way along
the coast to the north. People are faded specks on the other side of the
bay, and the gray, crumbling structures rise up from behind refurbished,
repainted façades, designed to fool the eye.

And then, I open a browser window, and Christ disappears to my left. I
open my e-mail and El Malecón vanishes to the right. By the time I sit
down to write at my computer, the desktop picture I keep is completely
hidden from sight, and Cuba falls into the forgotten background of my
responsibilities.

It's like that in life, too.

In one way, the assignment to Cuba three years ago changed my reference
point for what it means to have and have not, to need vs. want. In other
ways, it is like a vivid dream that jolts you from sleep only to fade
into the ether with the passing of a long, hot Florida day.

For weeks, I scraped the leftovers off my plate into plastic containers
until the refrigerator was overcome with Tupperware. I pictured my
rail-thin aunt, Tía Sofía, sitting at her kitchen table separating black
beans from stones for her staple of chewy beans and mushy rice. I just
couldn't bring myself to send down the garbage disposal all the food
that my family in Cuba might only dream about.

I sit in my daughters' playroom and try to fathom what my 5-year-old
cousin, Isabel, would make of all this. Isabel, who shared a bed with
her parents in a one-room building that is missing a fourth wall, who
gave me two of her precious few toys — two little bean-bag teddy bears —
for her cousins, my daughters, back in Miami. What would she think about
shiny and pink and marvelous toys that have a room of their own in my home?

When I called the hospital in Miami to check on one of my four uncles,
Tío Felipe, who had respiratory issues, I thought of Alina, my guardian
angel in Havana and the girlfriend he left behind, the woman who still
pines for him, who remains unmarried except to the memories of their
adolescence those many decades ago.

I think of Tía Sofía, of Isabel, of Alina, and how profoundly they
changed me. And how little has changed for them.

What has changed in the three years since I returned is what has changed
in the past 50 since Fidel Castro grabbed power. The Cuban state remains
a hermit, reclusive, recalcitrant, a selfish child who would rather
smash his toys before sharing them.

Despite relaxed U.S. travel restrictions and purported overtures from
the Cuban government, the inertia remains. It's all window dressing in a
house that won't sell.

And that stagnation rubs off.

I wish I could say I now speak to my Tía Sofía once a week. I don't. Or
that I keep in touch with Alina after she let me into her life. I don't.
Aside from sending money and asking my daughters to draw pictures for
Isabel when we know someone from South Florida is going to visit, our
relationship is as it was, now laced with melancholy. And I feel an
enormous, crushing weight of powerlessness for it.

Life goes on for everyone as the shipwrecked sailors wave desperately,
unseen by passing ships.

It happens to everyone once they leave Cuba, from visiting journalists
to those who were raised there.

In Cuba, I met a cousin I never knew existed, Ricardo, the unrecognized
son of one of my uncles. Within the year of our meeting, he and several
of my uncles helped Ricardo's 23-year-old daughter, Johanna, immigrate
to the United States so she could have a future of her own design.

Johanna, whom I called Magaly in the book, to protect her identity,
called me the second she landed on Miami soil. She met my wife and my
children and we saw each other at all the family get-togethers. Now, two
years later, she has melded into American life, going from night school
to English classes to her 9-to-5 in the accounting department of a Doral
exporting company, and we haven't seen each other in months. Facebook is
where we now update each other, literally, on our lives. And we keep
making plans to see each other that keep falling through.

When we do talk, it's about what happening here, with her fiancé and
with my daughters, in our lives on this side of the Florida Straits,
where there is motion and movement.

In the vacuum that lies between us and the ones we love on the island,
it's easy to lose Cuba for the stillness of the sea.

Cuba stagnated with Castros: Travels in the island nation gave a
journalist family contacts to cherish and a sense of loss to lament (10
December 2009)
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/cuba-stagnated-with-castros-travels-in-the-island-113988.html