By Julio Antonio Fernandez Estrada (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Cuba is an archipelago chopped into little pieces and carried in backpacks and bags. Every person who leaves the island of Cuba or the Isle of Youth or any of the adjoining keys carries a fragment of her as a souvenir; either that, or the conviction that they must do everything possible to forget her, in order to live.
Cuba no longer has the form of a crocodile. Now that crocodile with a diamond-shaped head looks towards the north, or sometimes to the east, and other times to the south, but never content with its wetlands, its lagoons and its mangroves.
Cubans carry Cuba everywhere. They want to found an island of rhythm, Cuban salsa, dominoes, loud arguments over baseball and politics, yucca with garlic sauce, fried plantains, and diced pork, wherever they go.
But Cuba is also people in pain, without energy, with too many losses, and too many things left behind; with poverty borne on their shoulders; with numerous injustices endured; with great nostalgia for what could have been and wasn’t – and for what they believed would come but was betrayed.
But Cubans don’t only carry their joy when they emigrate – that stereotype of the Cuban character that’s imposed on our imaginations; that joy people believe we have a surplus of, along with an ability to dance and sex appeal. We travel also, or above all, with our shortcomings, our ignorance of the world, our inbred totalitarianism, our socialist understanding of the universe; with our Spanish, African, Creole, North American, Soviet cultures, and that of hard work.
Those of us who leave Cuba do so with great hunger. We want to devour cream cheese, more than one piece of chicken for lunch, a piece of meat without gristle, bread that smells and tastes like bread, gleaming grains of rice. And we especially desire to snack on something between lunch and supper, just to know we can, in order to prepare the stomach for our next hot meal.
We also have other hungers that are l
