By Veronica Vega
HAVANA TIMES – When I see houses in danger of collapse, I remember Juan Carlos, a friend who is no longer in Cuba.
He lived 200 meters from the Malecón boardwalk, in Centro Habana, and one fateful day the roof of his house collapsed. Although he and his family had to be rescued by firefighters, luckily there were no deaths or injuries. But the collapse of what had been his home since childhood changed his life forever. Juan Carlos was an illustrator for an independent media outlet, and from then on, he waited for the hour when the sun was not shining on the roofless house to be able to work.
I don’t know why I am so attracted to buildings in ruins. Maybe because they expose the internal, like an X-ray. Because they are confessions of a failed dream, without any remnants of vanity. It’s as if I can hear the voices that inhabited them, now scattered in space and time. People who, like me, were born, grew up, and wove a mental path (glorious, of course), within that exciting menu the world offers and, in youth, seems inexhaustible.
At the same time, seeing how the sky triumphs over concrete makes me think of the death of bodies and their disintegration. It’s not sad if we think of it in terms of liberation. Nature also recovers what it had lost, and seeing so much green on crumbling walls, it’s impossible not to recognize the power of the invisible.
Without his house, my friend had no choice but to exile himself, and fortunately, through a complicated itinerary that included the islands of Suriname and Guyana, he managed to reach France and establish himself as a political refugee.
Now, sometimes I see him posting photos of sunsets on Facebook taken from his cu