by Margaret Randall*
Editor’s note: Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, photographer, and social activist, and she has authored more than 100 books. This is the excerpt of an essay narrating her 2011 return to Cuba, where she had lived throughout the 1970s. Her encounters with familiar as well as new sites and faces sparked her insightful reflections on Cuba’s past, present, and future. The full text of her essay and accompanying photographs appear in “Latin America Revisited,” the current issue of Social Justice.
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Havana’s seawall or malecón
A continent is a landmass. Its coastline, curves, and teeth remember other ancient coastlines that will forever represent lost body parts. A millennial language. But that language was spoken before time could categorize and order it. The languages spoken today sound small patches of identity, reflect indigenous peoples holding tenaciously to the places of their ancestors, cities that too often speak the conqueror’s tongue, destinations where human beings were traded, sold, and sometimes freed.
The American continent is such a patchwork, from polar north to Patagonian south. Between: the riveting majesty of Grand Canyon, thundering waters of Iguazú, stark desert beauty of Atacama. The secrets of Kiet Seel, Palenque, Tikal. And great modern cities like Montreal, New York, Mexico, Río de Janeiro. Places where anguish and absence are always just below the surface: Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Guatemala. And places where that absence has been redeemed, like today’s Bolivia, Uruguay, or Cuba’s last half century.
Cuba, against every neocolonialist and neoliberal obstacle, chose freedom in 1959. That the Cuban revolution, with all its problems and forced retreats, still stands, is as much a natural wonder as it is the fierce resistance of men and women, a people who continue to respond to no with a defiant yes. And within Cuba there is a space called Casa de las Américas, as old and unique as the revolution itself.
In the first months following the victory of the Cuban revolution, a visionary named Haydée Santamaría was given the challenge of creating an institution capable of breaking the cultural blockade.1 Not the military or economic or political blockades, those guns lined up against a tiny island nation, but the more amorphous and ever so much more dangerous efforts aimed at silencing the country’s artists and writers. Silencing ideas, erasing images, in both directions.
Casa de las Américas
Casa stands at the bottom of G Street, close to the malecón, that serpentine sea wall that protects the city from an ocean embracing and threatening simultaneously. It is a three-story gray building, once a synagogue, with a large metallic map of the continent embossed upon its northern face. Inside, galleries, conference halls, and the offices of magazines and research centers contain a living history of cutting-edge thought and artistic production from every reach of the Americas and beyond.
Haydée Santamaría
Haydée endowed it with a courage and wisdom that live long past her death. What has happened at Casa, what happens there still, is nothing less than the powerful magic of creativity and change.
Along with a couple of dozen other writers and thinkers from Bolivia, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, and Cuba itself, I have been invited to be a judge in Casa’s annual literary contest, known simply as Premio 2011, The Prize. Every year for half a century, literary minds from the Americas have gathered in Havana to read hundreds of entries in the genres of novel, short story, poetry, testimonial literature, theater, critical essay, or literature written by Brazilians, inhabitants of other Caribbean islands, and Latinos living inside the United States; and they have awarded the prestigious prize to the best in each category. I judged poetry in 1970. Forty-one years later, I have been invited back to judge testimonial literature. […]
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I stand before my old apartment building, trying to recall images of a time more than thirty years gone. Chunks of memory drop away then come creeping back, jostling for a place to stand. I can’t find my old neighbor’s name on the register but hesitantly press the worn tenth-floor button. A voice comes wavering through the rusted speaker. I say my name and hear a faint metallic click as I push against the glass door and step into the vestibule. Suddenly I am three decades younger. I touch the layers of worn fieldstones on either side of the elevator, trying to find the loose one that once covered the place where my children and their friends hid secret messages.
Inside the worn metal box that is the elevator, I notice a surprising absence of graffiti. Hundreds of coats of paint, brushed over its walls through the years. On the tenth floor, Silvia’s door is open and she embraces me warmly. The interior of her family’s apartment, similar to the one we lived in on the floor just below, begins cracking the dense barrier of time. I find myself wondering about buckets of water collected against frequent shutoffs, a stash of used candle stubs for electrical blackouts, cooking oil poured carefully from a refillable bottle, all the machinations in lives that have weathered the revolution’s ups and downs but have yet to secure that leap of progress for which so many died—and so many more remain exhausted.
We talk about old times and new, neighbors who are gone and others who still inhabit the eighth floor or the fourth. A son and his wife are there. The last time I saw him he was a child. Now he is a city planner, involved in the magnificent renovation of Old Havana. A thread of genuine caring runs between us, a strong, unbreakable line, dancing from memory to memory, avoiding the entanglements of lives now unfolding in spheres so distant one from the other it would take days or months to retrieve that space in which we might truly inhabit each other’s obstinate hopes and failed dreams.
Later Silvia walks me back to my hotel. A couple dozen blocks shrouded in Havana night. We hold onto each other as we navigate cracked sidewalks and uneven curbs. Groups of young people pass us, arm in arm. A small table where four old men play dominos emerges in a circle of light beneath a rare streetlamp. That 1950s-style building was a Jewish cultural center when I lived here. Is it still? We pass the hulking Américas Arias hospital, referred to as Maternidad de Línea, where I once had an abortion and so many Cuban women still give birth. We turn down G toward the sea, feeling a rise of moist breeze against our faces.
Now we are standing in front of the hotel. Silvia excuses her home attire and says she won’t come in. We hug goodbye. We will see each other often while I am here, but I will never feel closer to her than I do at this moment, touching the thin woolen scarf she pulls about her shoulders, the one she reminds me I gave her forty years before, when together we patrolled our neighborhood on a night much like this, convinced we were on the winning side of history.
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Rosario Terry García
Door, Trinidad
Restored glass and ironwork in Old Havana
Young Cuban dancer, Cienfuegos
Man with roosters, Trinidad
Tiled house, Caimanitas, outskirts of Havana
Huge Tree of Life by Alfonso Soteno Fernández, Metepec, Mexico. Gift to Casa de las Américas.
* Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, photographer, and social activist, and she has authored more than one hundred books. Among her most recent works are Che On My Mind and More Than Things (essays), and As If the Empty Chair/Como si la silla vacía and The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones (poetry). About Little Charlie Lindbergh will be out in 2014. “Cuban Postcards” first appeared in More Than Things.
Margaret Randall, “Cuban Postcards.” Social Justice blog, 12/2/2014. © Social Justice 2014.