Dreams

Every now and then I have twisted dreams. One of the most horrifying I have had was some months ago. I dreamt I had a majá (a Cuban species of serpent) tangled around my left leg. The dream took place in Cuba. The tail started in the superior part of the thigh and the head was closer to the foot. I felt it was squeezing it, almost a sense of immobility. I went out to ask people how I could take that thing away from my leg, and, surprisingly, I got the same answer all the time: “I don´t know, I have never been able to take mine away”. Every time I lowered my pants and looked at it, the majá looked back at me like threatening. Then I woke up. I felt immensely happy, because it was really a suffocating dream. I went downstairs and took a ride all over the house, still thinking about what I had just dreamt of. I went upstairs and lied on bed again. Amazingly I took the dream just where I left it. As if I had just pressed a pause to it. Someone called me on my phone to let me know I was already “authorized” to take the majá off my leg. But it kept just there, staring at me and I was afraid if I tried to take it off it could bite me or squeeze it more. I kept on asking I had the same answer. I woke up again, I guess because I was longing for it so much. I went downstairs and this time I made coffee. It was almost six a.m. I had a cup and, just sure I was not going to fall asleep again, I went to bed to watch the morning news. I just fell asleep once again and the dream was there, like a paused film. That reptile was still tangled around my leg. Got another phone call. They would send someone “qualified” (that was the word, I can remember it) to remove the majá off my leg. Finally that person arrived and, I don´t know how, disentangled it from my leg and put it in a cage. I was relieved, although when I took a look at my leg I felt nauseous. There was a horrible mark printed there and it had a wide range of colors going from green, yellow to purple. The man just placed all his instruments in a case and told me: we will call you when it is time to put it back again. And I woke up again.

I am not going to try to give a coherent interpretation to my dream. I am not interested. When I told some friends, they tried to establish some relation with the trauma of having lived in Cuba. But the point is that my dreams are not that metaphorical. Before that I had dreamt that I visited the Island and they did not let me come back in the airport. And Yanelys, my friend Osvaldito´s wife, told me she had dreamt that, being visiting in Cuba, she was forced to work in farming, like an orchard or something like that, and people from the neighborhood, especially the gossiper old women (or chivatas, as she says), the one in charge of the CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) and every kind of envious people, were walking by to make fun of her. She woke up frightened. And so, many friends of mine have told me weird dreams but the ones that have to do with Cuba always get my attention, because it is as if, psychologically, it does not matter how many miles away we are from the Island, it chases us like a ghost. I do not dream of Cuba every night, but in my dreams there is always a person from Cuba. During the days of the World Baseball Classic, I even dreamt that Cuba was losing. Every time I went to bed and next day Cuba was playing, I dreamt that the team was losing or someone called me to tell me it had lost. At the end it did lose, but about that defeat I could write in some other article. What I am worried here about is that I keep on having twisted dreams. And the dreams I am told everyday by my friends have to do with Cuba, with the blessed circumstance of having been born and lived in Cuba all those years, with pain, suffering, happiness, people, smells and stenches, all that come afloat in the dreams of those who live far from Cuba. Or at least in mine. Or at least in the dreams of those around me.

Treason

“I have been called traitor many times in my life. The first time was when I was twelve and a quarter and I lived in a neighborhood at the edge of Jerusalem. I was during the summer holidays, less than a year before the British left the country and the State of Israel was born out of the midst of war.

One morning these words appeared on the wall of our house, painted in thick black letters, just under the kitchen window: PROFI BOGED SHAFEL, “Proffy is a low-down traitor.” The word shafel, “low-down,” raised a question that still interests me now, as I sit and write this story: Is it possible for a traitor not to be low-down? If not, why did Chita Reznik (I recognized his writing) bother to add the word “low-down”? And if it is, under what circumstances is treachery not low-down?”

This is the start of the novel Panther in the Basement, by Jewish writer, Nobel Prize of Literature Amos Oz. In that novel, the main subject seems to be treason, or at least the novel tries to go over treason, but it really has to do with tolerance. It tells the story of a young Jewish from Israel under the British occupation who makes friends with an officer of the invading country. This friendship arises after Profi is detained by Lieutenant Dunlop after the curfew and he takes him to his family without other repercussions. They get, as they are walking home, to a tacit agreement: the Jew will teach Hebrew to the soldier and the soldier will teach English to the teenager. The adolescent belongs to a sort of a Resistance organization with two of his best childhood friends and, when he himself believes he is betraying them decides to tell them he is infiltrating in the enemy lines. His friends question that relationship, and he himself starts questioning if he is a traitor.

I read this novel with double satisfaction. First because it is written with great mastery and at the same time simplicity, and every time I finished reading a chapter I said to myself: this guy deserves the Nobel prize for sure. Secondly, because all the time I was thinking about treason and its implications in Cuba. Or at least what is understood by treason in our country, and I came to the conclusion that, once again, as usual, we are facing a disruption of concepts. I would prefer to confine myself to how this phenomenon behaves in the intellectual world and if I could, I would limit myself to literature, because if you are going to talk or write about treason in Cuba you have to start talking about the “Ochoa affair”, and even farther back, and that is too much tricky. I will write about what I saw and know, and beyond treason, I want to comment about the intolerance and arbitrariness at the time of deciding who betrays and who does not, because we know WHAT is betrayed.

“Epur si muove”, muttered Galileo Galileo in front of the Inquisition after admitting that the earth was not round. He had become a heretic. And what else is a heretic but a traitor? Centuries later, the history would repeat itself in our Island when Heberto Padilla had to repent and criticize himself for the only crime of having published a book that, after so many years, has revealed itself as an innocent book in the context of Cuban poetry within the Revolution. But back then it was dangerous that someone could write, say, think things like that. And it was more dangerous if, besides, the book was well received by a jury of one of the most prestigious contests of the country (UNEAC). And it already turned into a State matter if it was awarded and published. Padilla had been put into prison for writing a book and that would serve as an example for the rest of the Cuban intellectuals and it is represented an idea of what was the fate of the artistic-literary creation of the rising nation.

Back in 1999, with the idea of making up an anthology of poetry with the tree as subject, project I abandoned before compiling the first part, I was rummaging in the shelves of the Provincial Library José Martí, in Las Tunas, and I found (what a surprise!) three copies of Fuera de juego (Out of the Game), the alluded poetry book. In the first page, a green-blue stamp: CLOSED-DOWN. That was the word I least expected. CENSORED would have been better, because who can close a book down. The three copies were new, as if recently published, just with that half-yellow color due to humidity and dust, but they were virgin to readers. I asked a friend (of course one of those not interested in literature) to steal them for me. And I kept them in my room until one day I sold them together with a cheap edition of Cecilia Valdés. I repented after that, but money came at just the right time and I have never been he who treasures books.

The first time I read that book I did not even enjoy it too much, just thinking about what had turned it into a worshipped object. Padilla had betrayed the ideals of the Homeland. And since that moment I worried about treason. In Las Tunas I used to look at Guillermo Vidal, my literary father, and I could not understand why they had expelled him from the Pedagogical University, why the cultural (and not cultural) authorities of the province stared at him as if he was a dangerous weirdo. Guillermo Vidal was also a traitor. Despite he never wanted to abandon Las Tunas and died in that place he was, for the officer corps, a traitor.

But how do we know that a writer is a traitor? In the 70s, specifically in 1971, when the Congress of Education and Culture was held, there was a system called “parametración”, by means of which the cultural (and not cultural) authorities established what writers could pass through the filter, depending on the amount of impurities they had (sexual, religious preferences, political position and even relations with foreigners or relatives living outside the Island). That is why last year hundreds of writers and artists in Cuba and beyond raised their voices when the national television interviewed two of the more sinister characters of that time: Papito Seguera, who recently passed away, and Luis Pavón. Looks like the ones who suffered the system of “parametración” and those who feel they can be in the eye of the beholder got scared when they saw reviving those two gentlemen. After all the electronic scandal nothing really happened. Nevertheless, there are several questions still hovering over the rarefied national air: is there still a system of “parametración” in Cuba? Who is sin-free according to the Revolutionary Creed? How do we know now who is a traitor and who is not?

And I do not really know why I speak of writers, when actually I should be speaking of any kind of professionals who are not allowed to go to the Island just because the concept of treason there responds to mechanisms aloof from sanity and good sense. The case of writers is not the most frequent. I would be sinning if I thought it was. The invisibility where we have always been hidden has saved us a bit from the media rejection that the authorities propel. The most underprivileged have been the sportsmen, actors, musicians and doctors, but above all the first ones. Just as soon as a sportsman leaves the country, and as soon as they know people know, they read a note (published next day in the newspapers) on television announcing that the sportsman defected, misled by the mermaid chants, etcetera, etcetera… Sportsmen, and ballet dancers and actors and a long list, and even politicians, who, after having “served” blindly are dismissed before the minimum doubt, before the slightest shadow of treason. In that case, as in others, to treason is to contradict or swim against the leaders. The list has just grown longer. Roma pays his traitors but despises them. After having served for so many years now they are treated as unworthy and ambitious. Nobody knows for sure what these ministers have done to be dismissed just like that. Maybe they went against the Revolutionary principles they have instilled in us since we were born and that nobody carries out, because you have to be perfect. “Pioneros por el Comunismo. ¡Seremos como el Che!” (Pioneers, for the Communism, we will be like Che!), that is an almost suicide slogan I had to hear from my goddaughter the day she was given the pañoleta.

In Cuba you can commit mistakes, but you can not rectify. Boxers Erislandy Lara and Guillermo Rigondeaux, in an almost childish gesture, repented when they were about to defect in Brazil and went back to Cuba. They knew they would be punished, but they, I repeat, childishly, thought the authorities would have let them keep on fighting but it was not like that. And so, one by one, escaped when they realized pardon was not ever coming for them. Even Rigondeaux waited a little longer and not even his reference as the best world amateur boxer was enough.

I see that Beckham plays in the team he wants and in his country the Prime Minister or the Queen consider him a traitor. Or Pau Gasol in Spain; nor the Venezuelan, Dominican or Puerto Rican baseball players in their countries. And I see, when I walk by the streets of Brampton and Toronto, hundreds of immigrants and I wonder if they are considered traitors in their countries. Me, myself, before coming to Canada, despite I was leaving Cuba via a very legal way, I was questioning myself if I was betraying something. And the verb “betray”, whatever its conjugation is, sounds strong, terrible, painful, despicable.

Amos Oz in Against Fanaticism, a book that gathers three conferences about that subject, says that the traitor is “he who changes at the eyes of those who hate to change and can not conceive change at all, in spite of they always want to change you. In other words, traitor, in the eyes of the fanatic, is anything who changes (…) Not becoming a fanatic means, to a certain extent and someway, becoming a traitor in the eyes of the fanatic.”

More than enough for me.

The Fight

When you live in a foreign country anything that tastes like Cuba or reminds you of Cuba is welcome. From finding in a mall Conchita guava bars, canned guarapo (sugar cane juice) to hearing two guys in a café spitting pingas and cojones out of their mouths knowing, of course, that supposedly nobody understands them. That is why when on Friday night Carlos, another friend who chose the painful distance, calls you to invite you to Macho´s house (another fellow countryman) to watch three fights of Cuban boxers who deserted and chose professionalism, you cannot resist although you are tired to death. Carlos tells me that the fights will be broadcast by ESPN2, and the boxers are Erislandi Lara, Odlanier Solís and Yuriorkis Gamboa, the latter said to be one of the most spectacular professional boxers.

In that context, that is, surrounded by friends and beer and high doses of nostalgia, those boxers are not defectors or traitors, they are just Cubans, and as such we sit in front of Macho´s TV set, with a beer in hand, to support them, as if we were in Cuba and they were fighting in the Playa Girón tournament or the Pan American Games. And every time one of them won we were feeling happier because they are Cubans and being a Cuban is not whatever they taught us at school when we were kids. We were happy because we were watching those fights live, but at the same time we were sad for the amount of fans in the Island who had to be conformist and wait to watch them weeks or months later in an underground recording and we were also sad because instead of being in Cuba, with a bottle of rum, we had to be here, many degrees below zero. There was happiness, but there was also a certain contained anger, but everything was quite peaceful. We, as those boxers, had our own fight: a fight against nostalgia, a fight against distance.

Boxing and volleyball, after baseball, are the most followed sports in Cuba. During that time when you are sitting in front of the huge screen, watching them exude talent before other worthless boxers, at least in terms of technique, you start thinking of the amount of Cubans scattered around the world and, as an average Cuban, you think of how good we Cubans are. Ah, the Cuban boxing school, the Cuban baseball school, the Cuban ballet school, the Cuban piano school. We Cubans are so good, you think, but you don´t say it aloud, so that the little chauvinistic bug that always chases us does not bite you.

The Presence

Not so long ago I had one of those dreams that verges on the limit between the sweet fantasy and the fierce nightmare. I had arrived to an apartment that, as hard as I try to remember, I never get to realize exactly where it is located or who owns it. I just remember it was a mucky apartment like the ones in Old Havana or Centro Habana, with unpainted, chipped walls, cracks about to validate the gravitational theory. Anyway, the door opened and I got in, screaming because I was happy or under the effects of alcohol. That night I had gone to bed after some drinks, so that my subconscious betrayed me and I was screaming, which is unusual in for me. In the apartment there were a few people who were, obviously, my friends, but I cannot remember them either. One of them forced me to shut up, but I kept on screaming because I was happy, very happy, only God knows why. My friend grabbed my shoulder and asked me again to shut up. “Fidel has died”, he said. I laughed out loudly, how he could be so naïve, I asked him not to play games with me, but he repeated it was true, that He had died, he wouldn´t play with such matters. I told him, still laughing, that I had to see it, that seeing is believing, and my friend pointed towards a corner. There was no dividing wall between the living-room and the bedroom. At the end, and next to the wall, there was a small bed, like those in the hospitals and a corpse (it had to be a corpse) covered with a white blanket. I have seen that image repeated in hundreds of films, so that dreaming about it has not too much cinematographic connotation, it is not an image I could take great delight in. During the dream I could have become serious, maybe beginning to believe that certainly the Boss had died, although there still existed the possibility of a joke: under the blanket there could be maybe pillows, anything, and not the body of the Commander in Chief. My friend whispered: “Go and see”, and he was saying that with fear, as if he himself could not believe it. I started approaching step by step and looked back from time to time but there were no laughs or a face that could betray the joke. I got to the edge of the bed, kneeled down (as you are supposed to do before such a corpse) and raised the blanket. Under the blanket was, indeed, Fidel Castro himself. And just when I was starting to believe he was dead, and not even with time to react (astonishment, confusion, happiness, joy, pain, sadness, fear) he opened his eyes, placed his forefinger against his lips and, with a sarcastic smile, maybe a wink, he made “Sushhhh”.

That was not the first time I dreamt of Fidel. In other occasions I had told close friends and relatives about my dreams with the Commander in Chief and just after those dreams I had thought about the intensity of his presence and what it means for my generation and maybe also to other generations, but I can only write about mine, or maybe I can only write about myself. Probably one of the first images I saw was his, repeated in black and white (Krim 18) in a neighborhood where there were no more than three TV-sets. I imagine that my mother, staunch communist, used to sit in front of the television to make me sleep and he was always there. It was 1975: First Congress of the Communist Party, an event that would strengthen and redefine the ideological, ethical and moral principles of the Revolution. It was 1975 and the Political Administrative Division was already being drafted (passed in 1976) that severed the geography of the Island (read: its history), and at the same time ripped off that sense of belonging from many people, among them, those from my hometown that used to belong to Camaguey and later it came to be part of Las Tunas and I have to say that there was a time when my fellow countrymen felt they did not belong to any province at all, a situation that still persists among the eldest. So that we became a history-mutilated and neglected town, assuming a new history under the hallucinogenic effects of the triumphant Revolution that, back then, granted the power to people and induced us to think we were all equal. And in every moment Fidel was there. In the school (in every school as far as I can recall) his photograph repeated in the walls, in houses, in the streets, the newspapers, magazines, and of course in the mobilizations, marches, parades and demonstrations his image was always in hands of someone who bore him like a banner, faithful portraits or even drawings presenting him like a prophet of Abraham´s caste. The bearded giant (like a wise man of some antique council) was everywhere, “in every second, in all visions” and that permanence still remains. They taught us that Fidel was a father, but I never believed it. I knew I was born, naturally, after my parents´ copula and not because Fidel appeared, in a divine way, with eccentric lights, and mediated between them so later my mother (who is a saint but not virgin) conceived me. But I did hear, as a child, many of my friends and cousins repeat ingenuously that Fidel was their father (“daddy Fidel”), and even today children of this generation are instilled with the idea that Fidel is like a grandfather, “grandpa Fidel”.

If I had to list the indelible presences of my existence, the Commander in Chief´s would take up the first three. I could be in a far-off country some day and his image will still come to my mind; anything would bring him: a tall, bearded man, the green color, some olive sprigs, inquisitor‘s eyes, long fingers (also inquisitor), a phrase of “deep political content”, a dais, someone behind it putting up the microphones or wearing a white guayabera (he does not wear them, but his bodyguards do). Even if someone speaks about Cuba, probably before remembering my parents and those landscapes, he will show up. Just like when a Cuban hears the word “revolution”, he only thinks about the Revolution, because they taught us that it was the only possible revolution and that way, in us, the real meaning of that word got out of order. So that where it should be read “change”, reads “stagnation”; where should be read “transformation”, reads “immutability”, but where it reads Revolutions is always read Fidel and where it reads Cuba is always read Fidel. That is why for us Cubans is impossible to separate patriotism and Fidelism. And there another concept escapes from us: the homeland is Fidel. In Cuba, to treason the homeland is just going against the ideas of the Maximum Leader. So that, if one day there is a war in Cuba, we would not be fighting for our country but for Fidel.

It should be terrible, I think, that during my final day, and as I have seen him so much, as I have had him as breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, when I will be dying, in that moment when I will be modulating my last death rattles, he could show up again. I promised someone I loved very much that my last thoughts would be of her, that in my deathbed I would be thinking about her, but now, after thinking about what Fidel´s presence means in our lives (in the life of every Cuban, no matter where he is) I cannot guarantee to my beloved that it will be her image and not Fidel´s the one I will see that fateful and tragic day. Because Fidel´s is not a transitory, ephemeral presence, as it can be the presence of many people we know in our lives. His is a long-lasting presence like the Island itself, tangible like those cracks in the walls, painful like a labor, traumatic and schizophrenic as the Revolution itself.

The Philippines

Since I was nine years old I lived in a town that, still now, is somehow charming: Amancio Rodríguez, horrible name, imposed by the Revolution´s euphoria, something like a tribute for the martyr who sacrificed himself in front of the Workers´ Union. But before that it had another name, Francisco (also a horrific name) because that was the name of the sugar mill´s owner. It used to be a famous town, especially for its carnivals, “the best carnivals in Cuba”, people said, and because Benny Moré immortalized it in that song “Francisco Guayabal”, but it was also a town with such a bad luck that, after the Triumph of the Revolution, it assumed the new name, so it turned to be a common place, unknown.

When I visit my town I feel the nostalgia of the man who returns and starts discovering, sadly, that nothing is as big and beautiful as it used to be. Maybe because the eyes of a boy perceive everything smaller. Maybe because the eyes of a boy are blinded to certain phenomena, to certain ugliness of life. The last time I was there, sitting on a marble bench that the municipal government had planted at both sides of the main avenue, in the middle of such destruction and confusion, I was surprised at the fact that, in less than an hour, one after the other, six tourism automobiles passed through with their tourists and their respective jineteras. In such a dirty town, with broken streets, are peeping those luxury cars raising up mountains of dust. It is an aberrant contrast with the tractors that go along the avenue with that unbearably, beautiful noise. It is a contrast the peaceful face of the foreigner locked into the air-conditioned Toyota with the weather-beaten face of the peasant driving a Belorussian Yum. I suppose (I say this to myself to put sadness away) that it happens normally in every town. I suppose that it is not an exclusive case of Amancio, that all along the island those characters are showing off and that, in a small town, a jinetera is a public personage with certain notoriety and resonance. And then it happens to me the usual thing, that is, I go back to my childhood. Everything I see in Amancio takes me back to my childhood.

When I was a boy there were no jineteras. At least there was not that we know today as jinetera. By the time, the ships that usually docked in the Guayabal harbor (located 18 kilometers away from Amancio) were, of course, Soviet ships, but there were also Greek and, above all, Philippines. It looks like we were so used to the Soviets, they were so close to us, that the ones who really called the attention of the settlers of the fishing town and Amancio were the Philippines. They were weird in terms of features, very weird. Half Chinese, half Indian, too weird, too much contrast. Being a child, in the beach, I dared to say some words in English to a Philippine and he replied with an English phrase I now remember imperfect. That was the time when my professor Graciela used to punish me at her house and I started to become interested in “the enemy´s language”, just because I used to be bored during the punishment. And by that time there were women who used to offer their favors to those men, who were foreigners, although they didn´t go there to receive those favors, they used to go because they were sailors but, of course, they liked women and, of course, they used to leave one on each harbor. Just a cliché.

Prostitution is a phenomenon as antique as mankind, but that was really an event. We used to call those women filipinas, no matter if they were hanging around with a Soviet or a Greek guy. I remember them walking along the Guayabal main street, one of the most beautiful streets I ever saw, stretching beside the sea with a shadow of pines, that before the last hurricanes devastated the street and almost all the town. I remember them wearing denim shorts (very short indeed) and the hair usually dyed to look like blond. I remember them walking along the Amancio avenue, which I always compare with 23 Street in Havana. I remember them. I still remember them.

And still now, the Guayabal street should be, despite de hurricanes, a beautiful street, and still the avenue of Amancio will look like 23 Street, but those filipinas have nothing to do with today´s jineteras. The filipinas, the predecessors, received no sympathy from the people, they were not well thought of. In fact, when people called them filipinas was in a derogatory way. They used to have sex with those men but not for money, we have to remember that by the time the dollar currency was penalized and to have one was a crime as serious as to kill a cow. In return they used to receive soaps, perfumes, clothes and even apples. They brought those things in the ships, or were bought in a little store set for them in the village. The filipinas did not walk by the streets with authoritarian touch, with air of superiority. Nobody was dying to greet them. But that was another time. By then, my mother was a teacher, a respectable person in the neighborhood and no filipina could show off in front of her. In that respect they were modest, decent. Nothing to do with most of their predecessors, the jineteras, who feel a privileged class in the scenario of shortages and poverty that suffer the Cuban people since socialism collapsed, who find themselves lucky when sitting in a Toyota or a Hyundai next to a tourist who can be in their country a professor or a simple taxi driver; the jineteras, at least most of them and here I don´t want to be radical, are vulgar, marginal, ignorant and they flaunt that ignorance and hold it like a weapon, they raise it like a flag.

When I was in high school there were some girls (older than me) who were filipinas and then, as time passed by, turned into jineteras. It´s plain dialectics. When I was in high school, during the lessons of Marxism-Leninism, I learned the difference between Imperialism and Capitalism, that the first constitutes a superior stage of the second, and therefore it was a merciless, cruelest system. One day, when prostitution is deeply studied in Cuba, someone will have to write: “The jineteras, superior stage of the filipinas”.

Sitting in a marble bench by the avenue of Amancio, the town where I grew up, I kept on looking at those tourism cars peeping by. They are like diamonds in the middle of a pigsty, a spaceship in an African jungle. Then, suddenly, Amancio came to my mind like a beggar who asks for pennies and wears in his wrist a golden Patek Phillippe.

Suspicion

I was walking down Obispo street , heading to the Cuban Book Institute, as I used to do every morning, and a policeman, standing in front of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, was looking at me suspiciously. That is: he had a suspicious look and, besides, that look beheld certain suspicion towards me. I tried not to face him as I was not looking forward to stumbling with a policeman that morning. Not that there were other days I was wanting to stumble with a policeman, but particularly that morning I was not in the mood because just at 6:00 am, when I was maybe dreaming that I was been awarded with the National Prize of Literature, a truck drove in front of my house fumigating against mosquitoes.

It is not proper to wonder why the fumigation process had to happen so early, or why it had to be on a Saturday morning when, supposedly, normal people rest after a week working, that noisy truck had to drive in front of my house fumigating against mosquitoes. I just had to get up because the oily smoke started to get in through the gaps under the window and the air turned unbreathable. Of course I was upset, so I got dressed and after half an hour, a good estimate compared to other mornings´ trip, I started to walk down Obispo street and suddenly I found myself in the Mercaderes intersection, in front of that policeman who was looking at me as if my picture was glued to the walls with a “Wanted” poster.

I wondered what price would my head have, and I smiled, and I quickly hid that smile because the policeman might think I was making fun of him. So I looked down at the worn-out paving stones and I forgave the cop who was still staring at me with a suspicious glance. Because he didn´t know I was heading to work. Because he didn´t know I am a writer. Because I didn´t have a poster announcing I am a writer. Because I am just a black man and it was suspicious that I walked so early and slowly down Obispo street listening to suspicious music with a suspicious device. And I wondered what would happen, what would be the officer´s face if he knew I am a writer. Or is it that the cop was staring at me because he remembered my face from a TV show the night before? I doubted it. Is a writer a better person than the “common” citizen? Pretentious idea, above all when a certain image came to my mind, the image of some poets, friends of mine, who worked for a long time as watchmen, and I remembered the one who was doorman in a hotel, and the one who was in jail for some crime he didn´t commit, and the one who jumped over a raft and didn´t make to the other shore, and the one I usually met in the market buying fruits, and the one who is a prostitute, and the one who wanders around the streets of Havana selling sweets. And I realized that in Cuba a writer is a common person, someone who happens to be not that illustrious unless he or she is awarded with the National Prize of Literature or is invited to international fairs, or if, by any chance, has made a contract with a foreign publishing house. In the first case, there are some well-deserving authors, and it´s better not to even dream of being awarded with that Prize because that means, besides the monthly salary, that death is hanging around you. In the second case, there will be lots of people, especially institutions who will say you are selling your work to those publishing houses for pennies that are, in the worst case scenario, ten times more than what the national publishing houses are able to pay.

At that time, I was suspicious that walking down Obispo street that early was not a crime, but who knows. In other occasions the police had asked for my ID just because I must look like a criminal. Sometimes, in my writings, I have been a criminal. I have been a thief, rapist, dirty old man, assassin, pimp. But just in my writings. And it is possible that the policeman, as everybody else, knew it, and maybe he also knew it is hard to separate the author from his characters, that there are always features of the writer on them, that, at the end, you write about your own experience disguised with a bit of fiction.

I was suspicious that I was common, a common guy, a common black man with anything printed in his face except the word “writer”. I even deserved that the policeman would have stopped me and asked for my documents and prosecuted me for walking down Obispo street so early; and I deserved been called citizen. I would have told him that I am not a citizen, that I am a poet, that, one day, I will be awarded with the National Prize of Literature, but that would have worsen my situation, because a poet is a suspicious person, and a suspicious person is someone who looks like a poet, and policemen, generally, don´t like suspicious guys, nor poets.