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It was the year 2005, and with all the enthusiasm in the world we prepared to go to the island… and speak with Fidel Castro :-), he was still the head of the government. We knew about the shortcomings of Cubans and I took care of the medicines, while my friend took care of the school supplies. I remember the satisfied face of the doctors who welcomed us and also that of the teachers who made us go to a children’s class. Although we had decided that no beach (nothing from Varadero and other tourist places); we had the diving equipment, the Caribbean was waiting for us.
Arriving on September 5, it had been 12 days since Hurricane Katrina had visited them, it was destructive. We went over the Bahamas down to Cuba. The same arrival was sounded. Once on the ground, the airport lights were off for more than an hour. There we were inside the plane waiting for ‘orders’. When I went down it turned out that my suitcase did not appear, the employees tried to reassure me, they were surely registering it at customs, they saw something suspicious. After waiting a long time, the last suitcase on the plane arrived in my hands. It was your welcome. Two middle-aged women friends of a friend from Spain were waiting for us and we stayed for another day.
The hotel in Old Havana ‘Armadores de Santander’ was waiting for us, and also two native girls. We were very tired, we had a soda, we got rid of them and we went to sleep. It was already very late; We turned on the air conditioning in the room, the heat was stifling, the typical smell of Havana was with us.
With the two oldest we were hanging around Havana. We visited the Botanical and ended up in a restaurant on the outskirts, it was a Paladar, as the people of Havana call it. I remember that the youngest, my friend’s, put her ice cream in a lunch box for her son, surely it arrived totally undone. It is only for you to see the sacrifice of a mother in the face of misery. We were at the house of one of them, a single-family house on the ground floor, on a large avenue. We talked to someone who was leaving for the US the next day; that was secret. Later we learned that the wetbacks had arrived safely; In Tampa (Florida) relatives were waiting for them. And they were the ones who laughed when we told them we wanted to see Fidel. They told us that it was impossible, since for security reasons he could be in any of his three residences. I think they understood right away that we didn’t mean it.
My friends (those who touched me), the eldest was called Asun, the young Liubis. I would like to know what happened to them. My friend was 48, I was 58. He already died.
Fidel’s revolution took place in 1959, while the island’s neighbor to the north subjected the island to a ruthless embargo (1960). That was terrible for the population. They kept their military base in the east, the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, which was granted to them by the previous leader Fulgencio Batista, without being paid a dollar; the economic siege still lasts today, although somewhat less strong than in the past. Too close to your neighbors. In 1961 it was the ‘invasion’ of the reactionaries of Florida (Bay of Pigs) supported by those from the north, and which was rejected by the Cuban militias. While in 1962 the famous missile crisis took place that was about to trigger a nuclear war between the US and the USSR.
Continue in ‘Cuba in memory II’ https://sincristal.wordpress.com/2023/02/15/cuba-in-memory-ii/
Until the next reflection.
Joan-Llorenç sincristal@hotmail.com