By Lisbeth Moya Gonzalez and Maria Lucia Exposito (Joven Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – Barbara Farrat gave birth to a boy on July 11, 2004. She raised him within those four walls, shoring them up as best she could time and again. She also put her grandson’s crib within those same walls and roasted the peanuts she sold on the street to feed her family.
Barbara saw her son leave for a police interrogation from which he never returned. Then she hung a photo of him on the wall. For almost a year, she shouted her wish at the State, at God, and at the universe. Finally, her son returned, and as if by a curse, as if she were the main pillar of her house, it was enough for her to sit and rest with all her family inside for the roof to come crashing down.
The Collapse
April 11, 2023, dawned cloudy. It was a humid day when Barbara would have liked to wake up with her coffee and watch her grandson sleep soundly, but no. Since August 13, 2021, the day Jonathan Torres Farrat was arrested for protesting on July 11, 2021, she wakes up at five in the morning.
For a while, she woke up thinking about how to get her son out of jail. On May 25, 2022, after countless social media posts demanding his release, after many interrogations and pressures from State Security to stop her complaints, Barbara saw her boy, who had been arrested at 17, come through the door.
“I got him out of jail, and now I have to get him out of the ruin. Here was my little kitchen. It was never in good condition, but it was mine. I knew that at any moment the house would collapse on me. That day we felt the walls crack and ran out. Here I went through thick and thin, raised that boy since he was a little baby. All I have left here is my son’s photo on the wall. I look at it and know I will keep moving forward, for him and my grandson.”
Since the age of fourteen, Barbara has lived within the nonexistent walls she shows us today. We walk with her amid the rubble, interrupted by her mother offering coffee. Below the collapsed room, she sleeps with her husband, son, mother, daughter-in-law, and grandson. When dawn breaks, she has to lean the mattress against the wall. In that poorly ventilated space, no one can sleep in, as everyone’s rhythms must sync to exist. The mattress stands between the bathroom and the kitchen. If one wakes up, the rest must too.
“If I’ve gotten through worse, how won’t I get through this? I don’t ask for a concrete house. I don’t ask for help to get something I’ve never had, just to raise these walls and put a roof over my head. The other day, some friends of my son brought some blocks. I am eternally grateful because every brick of this house will cost me a lot of sweat. My family made me leave to clean up the hidden debris. I don’t want them to throw anything away because my little room was my world. If I’ve gone up there three times, it’s a lot. I don’t want to see how it is.”
Sometimes she fears going up to what was her space. Sometimes she manages to forget that her house exists, but life comes between her and her attempts to avoid it. “This is the true ‘special period’. When I was a girl, things were tough, but you could find money under a stone.