CubaCuba

 Text and photo: Eva Quesada (S4C Mexico City)

There was a window through which the light came in and bathed everything. I remember sitting on my father’s lap, he was so big, or I so small, that there was space to spare. On the turntable, a vinyl disc which songs where scratched with the firm needle’s vibration on its circular flow sounded.

I remember a verse of the singer and I remember as well my father’s face with the slightly wet eyes of who is touched but tries not to show it.

I grew up in a family where, when I was young, the Cuban Revolution was a fulfilled dream; Comandante Castro was a hero and La Isla (The Isle) was that small country that fought against the full strength of a huge monster thirsty to dominate.

Later, with time, history changed and more versions of it reached my ears. Castro was no longer a hero, or perhaps he was but changed over power and a Revolution that lost itself on the way. Castro, transformed in some sort of dictator, inflicted cruel punishments over his tired people. He’d shut the small island’s doors and let it suffocate as time passed.

Within the memory of this, my land, hundreds of names have been written of people that tainted history with their blood in the search for a little light for our Latin America. Among others, history names Salvador Allende, Ernesto Che Guevara, Benito Juárez, Simón Bolivar, and it also named Fidel Castro.

Of the Cuban Revolution a thousand things are said, of today’s Cuba a thousand things are said, from its accomplishments to its flaws, treasons, reached dreams and broken ones…

I took my camera and backpack and left for Cuba in search of an answer of my own. What happened to the island after 1959, when it refused to lower its head to the monster with a thousand heads?

First contact: I was in the Cuban airport, tracing a viable survival strategy that wouldn’t be the easy, tourist in a hotel, solution.

A huge lady with her skin toasted by the sun asked if she could help me. I answered that I was looking for a place to stay that would allow me to understand what being a Cuban today meant. The woman stared at me, astonished, and after listening closely to my carefully prepared speech she rose her brow and with a strange grin said “No sabes lo que dices, mami” (you don’t know what you’re talking about, dear).

She helped me, nonetheless, to find a place and then my journey began.

I saw a Cuba full of contrasts, scenes as beautiful as they were sad. A Cuba with a thousand hues, both in its scenery and in its skins that go from pure white to blue-black. Cuba, divided: one full of light and one very dark. The first one celebrates constantly, the latter simply observes.

I was immediately intrigued by the gaze of the people. A Cuban’s gaze has something different, something that comes and goes in a second. It disappears with the sound of rumba in that instant in which everything becomes a burst of laughter.

I saw a Cuba full of questions, with a thousand ideas about what’s “outside”: what they say there is but not everyone really knows. And those ideas mutate from simple doubt into wish, and from wish into anguish, and it is then that their confinement becomes so evident.

I saw a Cuba that also questions the Revolution’s results. The young that ask themselves about the present and the future to which not everyone has access and the elderly that are still excited about their Revolution, even if it didn’t have the results it should.

Freedom, in Cuba, is a concept to understand. It was for freedom that they fought and it’s that same freedom that many believe they lost. Freedom to be, freedom to come and go, to express yourself, to criticize, to inquire. And even if everybody knows that there is “a reason” for which that freedom was transformed into a series of strict and inflexible governmental measures, not everybody can explain or comprehend why this is so, and so, silence becomes an option for many cases and the desire to leave at any cost is born.

Y saw tenths of gazes lost, wondering upon reflections of what happened. It is obviously extremely hard to understand when there are so many needs and the consequences of fighting this enormous monster can be seen daily in a Cuba with a development that has been diminished every day by a cruel economic embargo that has been fed for years even despite the social cost it brings.

Reality in Cuba is, in many cases, contradictory and it makes one think once and again about the Revolution and its basic principles and the obstacles Cuba had to suffer in an international scope which results can be seen in a society that has been beaten by their own history. But one can’t deny either the inner scope, where the measures taken by the government have also, in many cases, lost sight of the engine that made the Revolution’s triumph possible; the people itself.

I then asked about Equality. That’s another concept that must be understood in Cuba. The Revolution assured a country where everybody would have the same opportunities, I found a sad and isolated Cuba, one far from tourism and the beautiful places that astonish and make the visitor drunk on all their Caribbean magic.

It’s a fact that in Cuba everybody has a place to live in, but not in the same way nor with the same space. It’s a fact that there are houses that have slowly fallen apart and nobody has been able to do much about it leaving its inhabitants with more questions than answers. But not all their houses have been dilapidated by history. There are houses, and Cubans, that where more lucky, and others that built a house with whatever they found. And some who with just one room find a way to invent spaces for all and to live despite all that they lack.

I think about all the criticism I’ve heard of the Cuban government, I saw every argument pass in front of my eyes, one by one. There is poverty, like in my country, there is also injustice, like in my country, and there are people that live day to day and would rather not ask themselves what will happen tomorrow, just like it happens in my country.

Sometimes I believe that much was expected from Cuba, just for being Cuba and it is criticized harshly, but it is a fact that international economics and the embargo itself has been a serious obstacle towards its development. Despite that, there are measures that I cannot understand and contradictions that are hard to justify.  There are also social differences that are hard to clarify, to look upon or even to digest.

The Cuban Revolution had many positive outcomes and many marks. Education, the high level production of professionals, the development of people that can do a lot with very little and above all, the birth of a country whose people can criticize their government harshly, but never their country itself. Listening to people who lived the Revolution takes you into stories full of anecdotes where the Cuban people had their own freedom as an incentive and would throw themselves into forging a new country. Today those incentives diminish and nevertheless there’s a peculiar love and innocence that unites them as Cubans.

Yes, I was intrigued by their gaze, by that fleeting but constant quality of it in the Cuban people’s eyes. I start to believe that this quality is precisely that bitter sweet love tainted with weariness, with sadness, with absence and mutilation. It’s the gaze of those who remain standing even if they lost a leg, a revolution, a future or a dream. It’s the gaze of someone that’s aware of being suspended in history awaiting the result of their history itself.

I remember that morning on my father’s lap. The turntable sang: ay, de la Patria mía, ay que se ahoga en pena, ay si llegara un día de mirarla y no verla ajena… ( oh, my  (Nation), oh if it drowns in sorrow, oh if the day will come when upon its gaze I don´t see it of others).

Eva Quesada, Mexico City, 2012

 Text and photo: Eva Quesada (S4C Mexico City)

There was a window through which the light came in and bathed everything. I remember sitting on my father’s lap, he was so big, or I so small, that there was space to spare. On the turntable, a vinyl disc which songs where scratched with the firm needle’s vibration on its circular flow sounded.

I remember a verse of the singer and I remember as well my father’s face with the slightly wet eyes of who is touched but tries not to show it.

I grew up in a family where, when I was young, the Cuban Revolution was a fulfilled dream; Comandante Castro was a hero and La Isla (The Isle) was that small country that fought against the full strength of a huge monster thirsty to dominate.

Later, with time, history changed and more versions of it reached my ears. Castro was no longer a hero, or perhaps he was but changed over power and a Revolution that lost itself on the way. Castro, transformed in some sort of dictator, inflicted cruel punishments over his tired people. He’d shut the small island’s doors and let it suffocate as time passed.

Within the memory of this, my land, hundreds of names have been written of people that tainted history with their blood in the search for a little light for our Latin America. Among others, history names Salvador Allende, Ernesto Che Guevara, Benito Juárez, Simón Bolivar, and it also named Fidel Castro.

Of the Cuban Revolution a thousand things are said, of today’s Cuba a thousand things are said, from its accomplishments to its flaws, treasons, reached dreams and broken ones…

I took my camera and backpack and left for Cuba in search of an answer of my own. What happened to the island after 1959, when it refused to lower its head to the monster with a thousand heads?

First contact: I was in the Cuban airport, tracing a viable survival strategy that wouldn’t be the easy, tourist in a hotel, solution.

A huge lady with her skin toasted by the sun asked if she could help me. I answered that I was looking for a place to stay that would allow me to understand what being a Cuban today meant. The woman stared at me, astonished, and after listening closely to my carefully prepared speech she rose her brow and with a strange grin said “No sabes lo que dices, mami” (you don’t know what you’re talking about, dear).

She helped me, nonetheless, to find a place and then my journey began.

I saw a Cuba full of contrasts, scenes as beautiful as they were sad. A Cuba with a thousand hues, both in its scenery and in its skins that go from pure white to blue-black. Cuba, divided: one full of light and one very dark. The first one celebrates constantly, the latter simply observes.

I was immediately intrigued by the gaze of the people. A Cuban’s gaze has something different, something that comes and goes in a second. It disappears with the sound of rumba in that instant in which everything becomes a burst of laughter.

I saw a Cuba full of questions, with a thousand ideas about what’s “outside”: what they say there is but not everyone really knows. And those ideas mutate from simple doubt into wish, and from wish into anguish, and it is then that their confinement becomes so evident.

I saw a Cuba that also questions the Revolution’s results. The young that ask themselves about the present and the future to which not everyone has access and the elderly that are still excited about their Revolution, even if it didn’t have the results it should.

Freedom, in Cuba, is a concept to understand. It was for freedom that they fought and it’s that same freedom that many believe they lost. Freedom to be, freedom to come and go, to express yourself, to criticize, to inquire. And even if everybody knows that there is “a reason” for which that freedom was transformed into a series of strict and inflexible governmental measures, not everybody can explain or comprehend why this is so, and so, silence becomes an option for many cases and the desire to leave at any cost is born.

Y saw tenths of gazes lost, wondering upon reflections of what happened. It is obviously extremely hard to understand when there are so many needs and the consequences of fighting this enormous monster can be seen daily in a Cuba with a development that has been diminished every day by a cruel economic embargo that has been fed for years even despite the social cost it brings.

Reality in Cuba is, in many cases, contradictory and it makes one think once and again about the Revolution and its basic principles and the obstacles Cuba had to suffer in an international scope which results can be seen in a society that has been beaten by their own history. But one can’t deny either the inner scope, where the measures taken by the government have also, in many cases, lost sight of the engine that made the Revolution’s triumph possible; the people itself.

I then asked about Equality. That’s another concept that must be understood in Cuba. The Revolution assured a country where everybody would have the same opportunities, I found a sad and isolated Cuba, one far from tourism and the beautiful places that astonish and make the visitor drunk on all their Caribbean magic.

It’s a fact that in Cuba everybody has a place to live in, but not in the same way nor with the same space. It’s a fact that there are houses that have slowly fallen apart and nobody has been able to do much about it leaving its inhabitants with more questions than answers. But not all their houses have been dilapidated by history. There are houses, and Cubans, that where more lucky, and others that built a house with whatever they found. And some who with just one room find a way to invent spaces for all and to live despite all that they lack.

I think about all the criticism I’ve heard of the Cuban government, I saw every argument pass in front of my eyes, one by one. There is poverty, like in my country, there is also injustice, like in my country, and there are people that live day to day and would rather not ask themselves what will happen tomorrow, just like it happens in my country.

Sometimes I believe that much was expected from Cuba, just for being Cuba and it is criticized harshly, but it is a fact that international economics and the embargo itself has been a serious obstacle towards its development. Despite that, there are measures that I cannot understand and contradictions that are hard to justify.  There are also social differences that are hard to clarify, to look upon or even to digest.

The Cuban Revolution had many positive outcomes and many marks. Education, the high level production of professionals, the development of people that can do a lot with very little and above all, the birth of a country whose people can criticize their government harshly, but never their country itself. Listening to people who lived the Revolution takes you into stories full of anecdotes where the Cuban people had their own freedom as an incentive and would throw themselves into forging a new country. Today those incentives diminish and nevertheless there’s a peculiar love and innocence that unites them as Cubans.

Yes, I was intrigued by their gaze, by that fleeting but constant quality of it in the Cuban people’s eyes. I start to believe that this quality is precisely that bitter sweet love tainted with weariness, with sadness, with absence and mutilation. It’s the gaze of those who remain standing even if they lost a leg, a revolution, a future or a dream. It’s the gaze of someone that’s aware of being suspended in history awaiting the result of their history itself.

I remember that morning on my father’s lap. The turntable sang: ay, de la Patria mía, ay que se ahoga en pena, ay si llegara un día de mirarla y no verla ajena… ( oh, my  (Nation), oh if it drowns in sorrow, oh if the day will come when upon its gaze I don´t see it of others).

Eva Quesada, Mexico City, 2012