When it was my turn, at the age of 17, to go to compulsory military service (SMO) in Cuba, all my friends from the neighborhood came to the doorway of my childhood home to tell me about their experiences. They were all different. That’s why I thought, “Mine won’t be like anyone else’s.” And so it was. I finally had my own individual trauma: even though I was urinating blood, they wouldn’t take me to the hospital.
I was deemed UNFIT due to high blood pressure, but a law had been passed requiring one year of SMO if you wanted to pursue the university degree you had been awarded after passing the entrance exams for higher education. And so they took me to that military unit in the municipality of Bauta. It was a horrible place full of despotic soldiers. There was a very cruel internal law that if an officer passed by during your break after lunch, you had to stand up, stand at attention, and salute with your hand on your chin. It was impossible for all of that not to smell like a concentration camp to me. But worse was that no soldier believed that boy’s headaches until he dropped dead while marching. The only way to escape the traumatic repression was to emigrate. In 1998, if you had no family to claim you, there was only one way to emigrate at my age: by leaving illegally by sea to the US, and I have always been very afraid of the sea.
Now that I live outside Cuba, I know that emigration is no different in terms of the collective memory that is formed from individual experiences. It doesn’t matter if you arrived on a red carpet or a gray one or without one at all, everyone has different experiences. And mind you, arriving on a “red carpet” is a metaphor created by the less perceptive. That condition does not exist. Especially when you leave a country in ruins. From the moment you embark on migration, the adventure involves unavoidable dangers that can only be overcome with your heart, your head, and your hands.
While the common thread among those condemned to the SMO is the trauma of involuntary military imprisonment and nostalgia for a life without unnecessary inhuman rules, we exiles are victims of a very cruel point of consciousness: coming to know and understand that, as María Moliner defined it, freedom is “the ability of man to choose his own course of action, for which he is therefore responsible.”
And to realize that in Cuba its inhabitants are prisoners of the shadows, because if anyone tries to cross the line to see the sun—which is presumed to be dissent out of necessity for light—they will be condemned to imprisonment and blindness, one of the harshest punishments that debase the spirit.
When a Cuban has lived outside the island and discovered that light, even when they only know of its existence through others, they are already armed for rebellion against manipulation, to be driven by the shaking force of reason. The wide and alien world, as the novelist said, is inhabited, in turn, by people of different sizes, intensities, and self-absorption.
I cannot fall into the rhetorical and hackneyed theme of adaptation to a foreign landscape. Robinson Crusoe, an involuntary castaway, managed to reconcile two phenomena: adaptation to that kind of biblical Adam and identification with a surrounding reality that for some would have been harsh and indocile, while for him it became reconcilable. Then, in a kind of diary, he was able to establish the foundations of his existence: exiled, but alive; isolated, but safe from death; cut off from communication, confined, but on fertile land.
However, these can only be seen as spiritual needs to justify an imposed destiny. For more than 60 years, Cubans have lived in confinement, frozen in a loneliness confined to an island that is becoming increasingly salty and less fertile, in an unliveable environment and with the frustration of their ideals (a condition under which human beings come closer to their irrational side). Even cavemen had dreams and ideas to achieve.
In my case, the adaptation has been quick. Eating, sleeping, getting dressed, taking my blood pressure pills, checking social media, etc., are habits that remain the same regardless of where I am. In fact, they may even be better in some ways. Shower gel, quality food, access to medicine, and fast and easy access to the internet are basic necessities that are not available to citizens in Cuba. All of this makes adaptation quicker and more comforting.
However, do I identify with my surroundings? No. I do envy Daniel Defoe’s character in that respect. Although the circumstances and atmosphere are different, Madrid has had the same spiritual impact on me as the jungle would have had: it is atrocious, aggressive, alien. It may have something to do with my anti-conquest attitude. I feel like the city is bearing down on me like a technological, cultural, hedonistic, and linguistic storm. Here I have discovered that Cubans have a broader linguistic spectrum than Spaniards. Any Cuban knows that polla, pene, and rabo mean the same thing, as do zumo and jugo, patatas and papas, or botella and pomo. But not for peninsular speakers. That is one of the many things that reflect their national fundamentalism: closing oneself off to linguistic variety is also a way of constricting thought.
Upon arrival, amid the cosmopolitan avalanche, one seeks the laughter, affability, gestures, and spontaneous greetings of Cubans, while encountering disapproving glances, frivolous reactions in places of inevitable interaction, and a very deep fraternal void. I am not referring to vices such as paternalism or the Cuban tendency to tell you your life story, no. I am alluding to the tone, the character, the pretence of the Spaniards when, even if they listen to you, they do not get involved or show solidarity. And, as these traits are very different from the everyday culture in Cuba, a human disconnect occurs. But what is the point of leaving if everyone comes back? And yes, it was enough for me to leave for my dead to return to my terraces in Cuba to drink coffee and talk in the immediate present.
Since I arrived in Madrid, the dream has had similar characteristics to that of Borges’ character in The Circular Ruins. While I sleep, I recreate a very distant, non-existent truth. And I manage to recover it from the past as if my mind, in apparent rest, wanted to construct another me, the one who does not leave and stays in Cuba with its living and dead. The dream also brought apprehension. I live with the paranoia that something bad could happen in that hell: a drastic change for the worse, and I would no longer be able to walk the same streets or go to the same cemetery to bring flowers. I still don’t dream about Madrid.
I had been in Madrid in May 2015. A three-month stay, and something similar had happened to me. However, back then I felt like I could take on the world and start over from anywhere. But I returned to Cuba for love, and I owe that wise decision to life. I am a happily loved man.
Now, at almost 45, the blow has been more shocking. I left my parents, my home, and my library. I arrived in Madrid in May 2024 with no books, to rent an apartment, and without family. Just my partner and me. To flee, we had sold our charming apartment in Vedado, which we had built ourselves on the roof of a building on G and 25. With the apartment on our friends’ terrace, the tangible memories were gone: the view of the Havana seafront, a piece of the sea, the dome of the church on F and 23, the Palace building. And we would also forget the stubbornness of the salt air corroding the iron on the terrace lanterns.
I have spent four months suffering from uprootedness, tearing away the guilt like someone removing a piece of flesh and experiencing something I did not know: resentment. A country is not its government as long as its people do not resemble it, and one of the main problems affecting the lives of citizens in Cuba is that the majority of people do not think, they reproduce. A country without education, without culture, without food, and without public health care makes people prefer to die trying to escape for survival rather than suffer a slow death while still alive.
Just four months later, memories of the bad life, the vulgar people, the deprivation, the drive I had to find between anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants to spur on that Cuban spectacle they call life, began to come back to me, and with them, the words and the desire to write also returned. Perhaps the visit to Alcalá de Henares had an influence. I went there because I knew that the man who wrote Don Quixote had lived in that town. And I needed to reconcile myself with one of the pieces of advice he gave Sancho when he went to govern the island, “because blood is inherited and virtue is acquired, and virtue alone is worth what blood is not worth.” The truth is that visiting the university where Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Calderón de la Barca studied is comforting and restores a bit of literary essence, which is another way of suffering and also of liberating oneself.
After tormenting myself with the ticking of the clocks under the storks’ nests in Alcalá, I think I left Cuba at the wrong time. I should have left earlier, but with the age and patience to identify with other ways of building a life. I will always be a fish out of water. It no longer matters whether by choice or not. Now all I can do is contradict Rastignac, this time from the viewpoint of the Parque del Oeste in Madrid, a few meters from the Temple of Debod, looking at the city and asking it to come and get me.
