14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 22 May 2024 — Ten years ago, I thought I would always live in Cuba. I knew where the graves of my relatives were. I knew how to speak Cuban, not the standard dialect, not Canarian, nor Iberian, which is what I speak now. I knew that my country was mediocre but Fidel Castro had one shave left — or perhaps several— judging from his beard. Maybe that would change everything. I had begun to study philology and worked in a library in Santa Clara. I had a cat and a lot of books. I had that life.
In effect, Castro died in 2016. (Judging from photos, only a few white hairs remained of his beard.) In Havana a giant anthill began to form that, when it wants to be, is my country. A battalion of insects and larvae and mosquitoes, all grieving, all with tears in their eyes, all there to see the corpse pass by. I knew that his death would disgrace the country, not because Castro had died – that was an epic relief – but because from then on the memory of the dead man would return, not from the future – he was known for being able to leap through time — but from the past, from newspapers and books, from the mouths of the nostalgic and apocalyptic. Fidel the Prophet, the Sacred Heart of Fidel, Fidel the Terminator.
The anthill would arrive in Santa Clara at dawn – nocturnal mourners, a pitiful spectacle – at the university where everyone had to be present. It was going to be unbearably historic, the newspapers warned. When I left the Central University, I made a point of being seen. “Where are you going?” a department head asked me. “I’m going home,” I responded, not knowing that years later the Cuban hip-hop artist Cimafunk would become famous for exhausting variations of that phrase until it became the motto of my generation.
I went home. A difficult task because it involved swimming against the tide of buses, cars and other elements that made up Castro’s funeral procession. From there, I kept going to closed spaces. My spaces, not theirs. Spaces that were becoming abstract. Ideas, novels, books. I went to Ecuador, I went to India. Remote places. Countries to which I would not have traveled had they not gotten in my way. And even though everything seemed to indicate that I would not go back, I always went home.