This year I had to dine alone. Just imagine. As usual. The family scattered across the map, failed loves, etc.
The friends who remain on this side of the sea have insisted that I go to their homes. The food that can be procured, I am told, no matter how modest it may be, will taste better in company. I have not written “friends” lightly. It is a word that has a lot of weight for me. Friendship is the only religion I profess: that amalgam of tenderness, understanding, solidarity, complicity, political and aesthetic affinities, critical sense, generosity and mutual admiration that has been amassed over the years. Friendship is not built with dogmas but with the permanent confirmation of affection.
But I have declined.
My somber mood fits perfectly into the initial typology of the pariguayo. The term comes from the Anglo expression of party watcher, dating back to the years of the American occupation of Santo Domingo (1916-1924), and referring to those who did not participate in the party, those who did not dance, those who were left to criticize. So I have excused myself to some by saying that I have already had an invitation from the others for weeks; and vice versa.
Instead, I have decided to summon a group of women writer friends to my imaginary table. As is usual in these cases, we will make jokes, we will toast with an optimism that we are far from feeling and we will end up telling each other stories of past Christmases. Above all sad stories, because, among us, Christmas is a celebration looking back to the past, when utopia seemed possible, and the discreet family dinner tasted great because we fully enjoyed the warmth of the people we loved, all within reach of a hug.
Eleven Cuban women writers will go hand in hand with eleven of our artists. Texts and images are not illustrated, they are accompanied by identical hierarchy, they are reflected like two mirrors facing each other. The testimonies were written expressly for OnCuba; I took the images — with the consent of the authors — from my archive, since I have dedicated a space to all of them in De otro costal, my weekly column.
And here I leave you so that you can read, with my same enjoyment, this handful of memories.
May you all have a happy Christmas, with deep and serene joy.
Diciembre sin ti (December Without You)
In my home, we don’t believe in anything, but we celebrate everything; and a celebration that includes lights, food, a holiday, and a little reconciliation (although once the family dinner is over we become cats and dogs again) wins us over. We have never had Christmas trees, because it seems pointless to us to buy something very expensive and artificial to use for just one month each year, let alone cut down a tree for such purposes, even though we live on the Isla de Pinos. What we always do is place the colored light bulbs, which we recycle from December to December, in the mamey bush on the patio, under which we have dinner, with the sound of the crickets like Christmas carols.
We don’t go to mass, although there are roosters at our party [in Spanish it refers to misa de gallo, Christmas Eve midnight mass, thus the reference to roosters], who climb on the table to peck at the congrí, and we also celebrate the birthday of Jesús, the uncle who is already turning the corner 75 times, as he likes to say. We don’t give each other anything because everything is very expensive, and having each other is the best gift, although my mother already announced that she would like a new washing machine because her old one is with making a “very strange taka taka” noise. We didn’t make any Christmas sweets because, for as long as I can remember, in my home one is made every Sunday, and with how bad things are and being a family of diabetics, maintaining more than one tradition that includes sugar is too much. If Christmas coincides with a Sunday, then we kill two traditions with one sweet.
Nor does it bother us that we don’t have something special to cook that day. We dine whatever there is: a whole roasted pig or a skinny chicken, the kind that grew up in the yard eating anything, but together. The latter seems simple, but it is not. It only happens twice in 365 days, and one is Christmas. The rest of the time you eat when you are hungry, when you arrive, at whatever time you can, in the room, watching television, alternating a bite with a glance at your cell phone, or standing in front of the stove, eating from the pot and no matter the hour.
At Christmas it is different. We put aside the screens, we begin to taste Rosa’s delicacies almost at the same time, we hand each other the plates so that everyone can eat everything, we leave the last portion of something for someone who we know likes it a lot, and we squeeze each other’s hands, and we hug, and we forgive each other, and we tell each other how much we love each other with the frankness and intensity of someone who knows that it will take another year to do it again, and that maybe we can’t anymore.
But this Christmas there will be a dish missing from our table, like thousands in Cuban homes. We will miss my nephew’s joy and his insatiable curiosity about the fat old man on the sleigh who gives the best toys to the children who have the most and the worst, and sometimes none, to those who have nothing; and we will have to break the promise of not looking at the cell phone while eating dinner because we are going to want to listen to him, between happy and tearful, tell us the stories of his journey to the country of the Christmas trees, and ask us about the friends he left here, for whom he is saving a sack of apples because this so-called “Santicló” never brings them anything.
Yuliet Pérez Calaña
Granma, 1986. Journalist and narrator. She is the author of the book Una guagua es un país (Ed. Áncoras, 2022) and co-author of the audiobook Lecturas colectivas del Código de las Familias. Her stories have been included in the anthologies La orilla del alma and Objetos textuales no identificados: narrativas emergentes en los nuevos contextos digitales en Cuba. She lives on the Isle of Youth.
Mentira (Lie)
It was a Christmas without snow, lights, or gifts. A Caribbean Christmas, which met no other requirement than saying goodbye to a year and celebrating the triumph of something I never shared.
I was working as a receptionist at a haunted and photogenic lake in the Ciénaga de Zapata, where tips and inventing allowed me to live decently, although with a chronic fear of the police. I had to work on December 30th and 31st, and January 1st. It would be free on the 2nd when only the stories would remain of the celebrations.
I tried to get someone to cover my shift, but everyone had plans to celebrate as a family.
It was dawn on December 31 of some distant year when I prepared to talk to the manager and tell him that I had a sick family member at home. I cried, in a convincing Oscar-level performance. The manager, who was a long-time friend, was so moved that he decided to take me home in his car.
It was 6 p.m. when we arrived. Everyone was at the hospital with my daughter, who had suffered an asthma attack. I felt a strange presence and a feeling of guilt that lasted to this day. She, my daughter, doesn’t know it. I ask her to forgive me.
Ana Ivis Cáceres
Sancti Spíritus, 1972. Poet. Her last published books, Los años del insomnia and Almost 90 Days, appeared in 2023 with the labels of the Dos Islas and Primigenios publishers, respectively. She lives in Miami, Florida.
A mí lo que me gusta es el mango (What I like is Mango)
For my family, between distance and forgetfulness.
In my family, no one said Christmas, I never heard that word. No celebrations, commemorations, or festivities: the end-of-the-year party and that’s it. It was the time when grandparents, uncles, cousins, second, third, and even ninth cousins, took advantage of the certainty of the pork roasted by my uncles Julio and Armando in the oven of the Unión de Reyes bakery (the one that Che had once visited and verified in situ that the best crackers in the province were “made” there) and they dropped by my great-grandmother Marcela’s house. The eating spree, the jugs of rice wine that my grandfather Merejo made, the boxes of beer in the fifty-five-gallon tanks, and the fritters made from yellow malanga and coconut sweets from my grandmother Alfonsina Dulce María… It was glorious…
I also don’t remember talking about the Christmas tree. In my piano and singing teacher’s house they did display a HUGE tree, full of half-painted light bulbs. But there it was logical that there would be a tree, with baby Jesus’s crib among cotton, because my teacher’s family was from the upper class, with cousins who sent her things from abroad. They surely commented among themselves that this was celebrating Christmas.
That’s why I was so happy when mommy gave me an apple on New Year’s Eve of a year that I no longer remember. An apple, as if I were also from the upper class. Very red. Brought from “over there.” I felt (I feel) the weight of it in the palm of my left hand.
The first thing that mommy warned me was that I should not leave the room, that it was just that one and we were too many kids to share. As a good only daughter, that is, obedient and stingy, I was left alone with the fruit. God and I know how much my apple and I enjoyed it. I put a headband on my forehead, like a crown, and spoke to the mirror on the dresser. That I was Snow White and I was going to pretend to be asleep so that the prince would kiss me on the mouth and I could kiss him back. That was the fruit of rich people, that of Doña Bella, that of the Brazilian soap opera (or was hers the passion fruit?).
I don’t know how long I acted in front of the mirror. But oh disappointment! When mommy returned, she would find me in tears. Just one bite was enough to make me not be interested in tasteless apples even today. What I like are mangoes. And that my family gets together again, for Christmas or New Year’s Eve, the name doesn’t matter. Anyway, I think that a guajira like me is not prepared to be from the upper class.
Maylan Alvarez
Unión de Reyes, Matanzas, 1978. Writer, editor, journalist, literary promoter, wife and mother. She has published more than a dozen books of various genres. From the window of the place where she writes she can see the sea. She lives in Matanzas.
Inventarse la alegría (Inventing Joy)
When my maternal grandmother, daughter and granddaughter of landowners, was forced by her parents to choose between family or her boyfriend, a poor young man with “no future,” she, the most generous person I have ever met, chose the boyfriend and left her paternal home, taking very little with her: some clothes, family photos and a box with Christmas tree decorations.
Many years later, my brother and I, searching through the drawers of her wardrobe, discovered, ecstatic, shiny balls of multiple colors and curious clay figurines that represented animals, people, mountains, houses… For us, children who did not know what Christmas was, who had never entered a church, who had not even been baptized, they were just peculiar objects, a fiesta for our imagination and our senses. Christmas was on our island, in the distant 1970s, a foreign, forbidden word.
It wasn’t until much later that I entered a church. It was the end of December 1994, a terrible year in which I was, as almost always then, disoriented and sad. I remember passing by that corner by chance, and I was attracted by the chants that came from inside that place. Then I entered and I liked the joy of the people, the smell of the flowers, that breath of mystery that seemed to take over every space, the saints who, from their altars, looked at me imploringly with their glassy eyes, as if waiting for the miracle from me. And I stayed. I felt protected by those people who had faith, a kind of joy in their hearts. Because in 1994, despite everything, the exodus of that year, the separation of families, the dead at sea, the bare tables, in my Cuba there was still joy, a certain glimmer of hope.
Many years have gone by since those distant years, and the Christmas decorations that grandmother kept as a treasure were fading in time, between dust and oblivion. I didn’t know how to protect them. Now, as I write this chronicle, I think about everything that was denied to my grandmother, my mother, and me. I think that the three of us, in some or every possible way, had Christmas stolen from us. That may be why Decembers have a bittersweet taste for me, and they take me back to my childhood of winter and drizzle, to my grandmother and her untimely orphanhood, to those decorations that she kept, perhaps as the only certainty that her childhood had existed.
I also think of the Christmas tree that I never had, of the old people in my neighborhood who have been dying, and those I could not say goodbye to because life, so unpredictable, pushed me almost three years ago to this little island far away in the middle of the Atlantic, which is filled with giant trees, lights and garlands every December, where joy still exists and every end of the year is a festival of colors, of flickering light bulbs in every corner, of enthusiasm, those unknown things, new to me.
I love seeing others happy and, I don’t know, but I decided to put a Christmas tree in my house this year. I will choose a very green pine that reminds me of Cuba and its countryside, I will buy beautiful lights, decorations of all kinds, many colored balls, a star, a small nativity scene. It will be my tribute to my grandmother, to my mother, to myself. I will try, why not? to be happy under a foreign sky, far from almost everything I have loved. I will open my heart and silently thank God for that Christmas of 1994 that allowed me to know hope, for this other Christmas of 2023 when I am so equal and so different. In short, it is necessary to de-dramatize, learn to break cycles, and invent joy.
Yanira Marimón Rodríguez
Matanzas, Cuba, 1971. Poet and narrator. In the process of writing are her collection of poems Mientras espero el alma and her book of short stories La muerte solo llega los domingos. She resides in Las Palmas, Grand Canary, Spain.
Jesús nació en Catia (Jesus Was Born in Catia)
A star of an unattainable tree, for Cuban children of the 1980s, Christmas was a beautiful and alien event. We saw it in the movies, it was the holiday that grandmothers and parents ― who lived the last Christmas in 1959 ― remembered with nostalgia. Christmas happened somewhere else, it happened abroad. In my case, furthermore, not to mention relating it to Christ. I found out the date of that birth on December 24, 1992, at the age of 12, when a friend and I entered the Carmen church in Havana (we had been doing this), decorated for the occasion. Surprised, I asked what was the reason for such pomp.
I had to go to Venezuela to be able to enjoy my first Christmas with “everything” that it entails. In quotes, because what it celebrates has its origins in the precarious and because that everything, newcomers, was not yet within our reach. Then it was a spark in the air, a rush of lights. They were the trees and the nativity scenes, which looked more like a hill in Caracas than a manger in Bethlehem. It was the smell of hayacas and ham bread; the lit Ávila cross, that December landscape that would later become invariable in my window.
We passed through several houses before we could find a space that felt like ours, that pilgrimage typical of the first stage of emigration. I will not talk now about the betrayals and false promises that are also part of that first stage. On December 24, 1993, just over a month after our arrival, we finally settled in a small annex. Upstairs lived another Cuban family, also recently arrived. I spent my first Christmas Eve with them, at the home of some Venezuelan neighbors who were already their friends and who kindly welcomed us. There was food, there was dancing and there was music. In conclusion, there was community and communion. The end of a pilgrimage and the arrival of a (re)birth.
Now I live in the country of jingle bells and combined Christmas pajamas, in a city that brings together my community of origin, but Christmas for me will always be Venezuelan. I can’t help it. Jesus was born in Catia.
Kelly Martínez-Grandal
Havana, 1980. Poet, essayist and narrator. She has published the collections of poems Medulla Oblongata (CAAW Editores, Miami, 2017) and Zugunruhe (Katakana Editores, Miami, 2020) and the book of short stories Muerte con Campanas (Suburbano Editores, Miami, 2021). She lives in Miami.
La Navidad me sabe a algo crudo (Christmas Tastes Raw to Me)
My father was born in 1937, and for some years he was responsible for setting up a small indigenous tree in my house with Huichol crafts: balls and bells made of woven straws, and hand-painted baked clay stars. No “cribs,” because my dad is an atheist.
During his childhood, Christmas was a privilege for others, not for the son of a housewife widow of a communist.
My mom was born in 1957, and she remembers some Christmases. The grapes, the apples, the family reunited. It is one of the few clear memories of her childhood. A large, united and loving family around an occasion whose traces of religiosity were left out of the equation.
The children of a modest-marriage-in-Havana-recently-arrived-to-a-new-age-of-innocence liked grapes, apples and parties.
I was born in 1983, and I no longer remember grapes or apples. The only holiday was January 1st, and its meaning completely escaped the Christmas spirit. It was the anniversary of the triumph of the Revolution. I remember the slogans “31 and more”, “32 and more”…and being hungry. Cabbage leaves with brown sugar in thankless years of Chinese bicycles and goose pasta. That Cerelac that I could never digest.
Someone once told me that if I held my nose and bit into a raw potato, it would taste like an apple. Since then, apples taste like raw potatoes to me.
Christmas tastes to me like something raw, something that was not cooked with love in my sentimental upbringing. It was not cooked in any way. It’s something I chew with my nose covered, so the raw potato feels like an apple.
My children were born in 2016 and 2019, respectively. The grapes and apples were first sold in CUC and then in MLC. The orphaned children of the promised social justice lack certain privileges in a society “with all and for the good of all.”
Christmas lives in another place. It is not a daughter of my land. It is a torn piece of land, a wandering island of lotuses. Those who took Christmas away in my country already communicate directly with the God whose birth is commemorated on December 25…or they celebrate Christmas in other lands of the world.
Here, in Cuba, Jesus of Nazareth would have to be born again.
Liliam Ojeda
Havana, 1983. Singer, actress and playwright. Currently she is rehearsing the play Robin, by Reinaldo Montero, with the El Cuartel Company. She lives in Havana.
Postal (Postcard)
During my childhood, Christmases were poor and discreet celebrations. Or none (I was born in 1962). In my experience, I associate one of these festivities with the anguishing crisis of conscience of my father, who, obeying the command of an imaginary being, prepared a bonfire in the backyard to burn missals, religious images and, symbolically, put an end to old molds. He was so disturbed that he didn’t care that my brother and I plundered his bag of good luck hazelnuts.
Becoming an obedient soldier of the Siberian Detective (obsessed with that book by a Soviet author), he stopped venerating Saint John Bosco, Saint Jude Thaddeus, Jesus, Mary and the Holy Ghost, and never spoke again about the priests’ school. With great difficulty, we rescued from the ashes some silver and calamine medals that resisted the fire.
This time he would go after luck himself, tired of it not arriving by invoking it with wet and stale hazelnuts, nor with his long repertoire of prayers. That chapter closed the few Christmases we had had as a family, all without lights, without shine and without baby Jesus in the manger. Now, to make matters worse, there would be a lack of stories that would leave in us the inspiring mystery and joy of the good word. Christmas was, at that stage: silence, strangeness, meditation.
In 1979, when I was 18 years old, from the freedom of the student residence on 12 and Malecón, in El Vedado, I rediscovered the dancing lights of Christmas that my father once promised us. Without causing me anxiety, the tree filled the memory of the absence: one of the few families that lived in that building maintained the splendor of the custom, despite the ideological rigidities of the times. The young guajiros who enjoyed the modernity of the 20 floors, used the trick of marking the floor number several times (I don’t remember if it was 10) on the elevator blackboard, just to observe from afar the exotic setting that, in a pact of silence, opened generously to our eyes from the hall.
Over time, thanks to Luis Lorente and the Christian tradition of his family, I had the opportunity to know and share for twenty years the authentic Christmas that Monsignor Jaime Ortega honored with devotion, surrounded by very dear people, music, readings, stories, laughter, blessings: Nancy and Ramón (and daughters), Lourdes (and daughters) and Amaury, Hortensita, Lucía and Padura, Luis, María, the nuns of the Archbishopric, Monsignor Polcari and, on some occasions, Fathers Pepe Félix and Yosvani Carvajal. Those encounters reformed some traces of my soul.
Today I keep that Christmas card like a shield. I represent it for myself in the form of a landscape mural, full of multiple nativities and witnesses. In some of its sides appear, my four grandparents, three brothers, parents, cousins, uncles, nephews, essential friends and their own families that have been (and still are) mine…. I include a scene where my father, now lucid, receives the absolution of Jaime Ortega, a man of faith to whom we owe so much.
Charo Guerra
Limonar, Matanzas, 1962. Poet, narrator and editor. Her most recent collection of poems, Limpieza de sangre, will be presented during the Havana Book Fair in February 2024. She lives in Havana.
Las despedidas (Farewells)
December will always bring that taste of farewell to me. Maybe because Christmas is a sad date in which, since I was a child, I have seen the departure of a family that started out very large and that has now become that of two solitary sisters who eat whatever they can for dinner around a table where only my brother-in-law and some friends are preparing to celebrate a date that we must celebrate.
First there were my cousins. Their mother took them away from us under the pretext that the government was going to take away from her and her husband their parental rights over their daughters. My father showed up at my grandparents’ house dressed as a militiaman, which provoked the anger of the rest of the “disaffected” people whom I would never see again. It must have been around the beginning of the 1960s.
Christmas was then a sacred date. My cousins played, as always, with us, while at dinner my father praised the beginning of a new era that in the 1990s would be a nightmare for him. It was also in December when he left us to go to Miami. He had been invited by his sister, the same one with whom he had difficult relations until then, to the point of suppressing all contact.
Christmas, for many years, was almost prohibited, and when it began to be celebrated again it seemed that everything was normal. I didn’t know that in another of those Decembers, one of my sisters and, later, my nephew would also leave. And a little later my mother would die, leaving Elizabeth and me almost alone in the place that had long ago been everyone’s home.
Christmas brings that taste of absences that does not allow me to enjoy the succulent dinner that the only sister I have left in Cuba prepares every December 24, and that becomes a scene of mourning, at least for me.
Marilyn Bobes
Havana, 1955. Journalist, poet and storyteller. She twice won the Casa de las Américas award for the book of short stories Alguien tiene que llorar (1996) and the novel Fiebre de invierno (2005). Her most recent published book is La aguja racional (Ed. Union, 2016).
Día de la Liberación y el Desorden Absoluto (Liberation Day and Absolute Disorder)
My dad’s last Christmas was my son’s first. Their faces are so similar that the photo of both looks like a montage. They could not eat pork or drink because of the illness of one and the age of the other. Their entertainment that day, surrounded by the Cuban Christmas hustle and bustle, was watching children’s movies.
The room they were in sounded like a children’s place. I heard them laughing every time I passed by. The baby tried to sing and my father would rewind the film to listen to the current song again. And again. I took on the task of guarding the door so that no one would interrupt them. When someone tried to go in, I asked them to leave them alone, and I did the right thing: the next day Juan went to the hospital and did not return home with his grandson. He left on January 1st on his way to the cemetery, increasing by one the overlapping and never-resolved mourning that my family carries.
That’s why we don’t celebrate the end or the beginning of years. It is a date that passes in silence and total normality, like any other. We don’t even turn on the TV set. We try to ignore it, to forget that it exists. Each person chooses the way to mourn, and ours is that, wrong perhaps, but ours. My son locks himself in his room to listen to music or goes to his father’s family’s house.
We have changed the destiny of the days. We celebrate December 24 with music, movies, food and drunkenness. A Christmas that is the end of the year, new year, Liberation Day and Absolute Disorder. It is untouchably familiar: no one from our tiny clan can be absent and no one has the right to be in mourning or unhappy. It is like a catharsis, a rebirth or a forgetting, twin of the oblivion that we orchestrate on the last day of the last month.
A while ago, talking with my son, I confirmed what I had been suspecting: for that young man the year does not begin or end when it should, but on December 24.
I think it’s time to teach him something different.
Yadira Álvarez Betancourt
Havana, 1980. Narrator, teacher, blogger and mother. She is co-author of La Guadaña Universal: el códice (science fiction, in the process of publication) and Historias de Vitira (fantastic narratives, Gente Nueva, 2017). She lives in Havana.
El muro de los lamentos y una lluvia inesperada (The Wailing Wall and An Unexpected Shower)
For the first fourteen years of my life, I enjoyed the long-awaited December holidays as only children can. They meant the arrival of the cousins, who came from Havana for that unique occasion, the strange little tree with thorny branches and oval leaves that my father went out to cut who knows where on the Pinar del Río coast, and that, once sprayed with silver paint and placed on a base, we filled with the surviving spheres of the lost family Christmas glory, some garlands of lights with water bulbs that were still bubbling by pure miracle, and a peeling plaster manger that we sank next to the trunk in tons of cotton.
But the wonder of that happy time were the delicacies that still arrived at the grocers as part of a one-of-a-kind holiday basket: Spanish nougat, preserved sweets, boxes made of little boards where guava paste was packed, cheese, apples, grapes for swallowing to the sound of twelve bells on December 31 and, above all, walnuts and hazelnuts!
Yes, my Christmas smelled like empanadas stuffed with minced meat with raisins or guava paste, and it sounded — more than like Christmas carols — like the delicious noise made when the almost spherical nuts that were (and still are today) my longed-for December feast were broken. I loved the hazelnuts that arrived on time every December until the Grinch stole Christmas from us to inflate the dream of the largest harvest ever seen in history. And if the 10 million went (which they didn’t) my beloved nuts were never more. 1970, a fatal year.
On December 24, about four years later, my sisters and I were nostalgically recalling the glorious days of the roast leg, apples and coconut sweets from La Conchita, sitting on the floor next to the kitchen door, open to the long, narrow hallway that separated our house, a typical construction from the “lean” times, from that of the neighbors. Between our conversation and what was heard by Nené, the angel from the home next door, there was only a wall a couple of meters high. It was then that I said that my deepest loss was hazelnuts and that I would have given anything to have just one under the hammer again. What would not be our astonishment when out of the blue it began to rain hazelnuts on our heads, in a singing fountain that gushed just from the other side of the wall?
It is worth saying that that unexpected gift from Nené had been in a drawer for too long to be edible, but the intention is what counts. It is the most convincing proof I have to continue believing in the magic of Christmas.
Norma Quintana
Pinar del Río, 1956. Poet. For more than two decades she has dedicated herself to literary research and university teaching. Her most recent collections of poems are De pólvora y jazmines (2014) and Memorias de mis días (2018). She lives in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico.
Yo me quiero ir (I Want to Leave)
I’m on the next island about to break my canoe coming back. I can no longer think of anything other than abandoning Cuba and with Cuba everything I know to this day.
There is a giant tree in the lobby of that hotel and it is full of garlands, stars, lights that twinkle for no reason. Nothing takes me to a more absurd, more impossible place than a Christmas tree. These will be the days when I will be the most Taíno goddess and disciplined daughter of the colony. Everything at once. I want to leave! I’m also afraid of a trip without you. You, crying on the next island, in this strange place to experience 2005 and its Christmas.
I’m on my way out. I need sea air.
Suddenly Santo Domingo seems more beautiful than Havana; but I won’t be able to say it. Santo Domingo of borrowed lights. Colonized like me. Santo Domingo/Christmas tree also wants to go. They’ve been wanting to get away forever. We are two.
I jump up and my great aunt is placing her hands so I can climb to the neighbor’s window and see their hidden tree. Everyone in the neighborhood knows that they set it up in December; but since it is prohibited, they close the doors and leave only one high window ajar. My aunt wants me to see the lighted-up tree, for me to surrender to its outlawed magic when I am only six years old, it is 1982, we will be cosmonauts in 2000; but I still want to leave, even if I don’t know where.
From the neighborhood tree to the hotel tree in Santo Domingo there is only one communicating vessel and that is my desire to rescue some people and take them somewhere else. Fill the canoe with my aunt, my grandmother, my woman. Three beings whose hearts I will later break with my departure.
Now, it’s 2023 and I’m already packing my bags to go back (suitcases of coffee/aspirins/soups/adult diapers/jellies/custard/soaps and syringes). I think I’ll never know what happened there, on the first “real Christmas.” And between jumping to look into the neighbor’s window and into the void on the island next door there are only a couple of fake garlands that my mother buys the first time they let us celebrate without the doors closed. It is 1997 and we have gotten a small tree made of wood and plastic that does not reach a meter in height. My great-aunt gets excited, the neighbor opens the doors and displays their giant tree in the middle of the living room. My girlfriend, who is not one at the time, orders me another fake tree just in case. The Pope has given us his blessing. I want to leave.
It’s 2005 or 1982 or 1997 or 2023. I’m in an airport full of Christmas carols. Without understanding.
Mabel Cuesta
Matanzas, 1976. Writer and university professor. Her most recent books are In Your Face, Papi. Arte, política y sociedad civil en Cuba (Aduana Vieja, 2022) and In Via in Patria (Rice University, 2016). She lives in Houston, Texas.
Author
Alex Fleites
