IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 85

States challenge him with a flood of
unknown consumer products, and even
personal rights? In the end, that is the
new norm in which he must live his new
life: consuming and deciding a lot, on a
daily basis, and getting concrete results.
Even if that is what he dreamed of all
the time, it was only a matter of imagination, unreal. He is not prepared for
this challenge. It is sudden and surrounds him like a band of wild Indians.
He needs something to hold on to, a
mental place in which he can take a
break from all this sudden, persistent,
unavoidable variety that force him to
make choices, something he had never
been able to do before, except in an extremely limited context.

when they received the yellow envelope
bearing her husband’s name they
couldn’t believe it. They thought someone was fooling them, that it was a cruel
joke. But it ended up being true. Bitterly, though, it also ended up being true
that once they started living in their new
country, both began to yearn for things
in Cuba. “I couldn’t stop thinking about
my family. Even about my father’s dog,
and I can’t stand dogs.”
The husband, who is very handy for any
kind of manual labor, had difficulties
because he couldn’t find well-paid
work. His priority was buying tools to
try to start his own business. But they
were too expensive. So they both got
progressively frustrated, to the point
they wanted to go back to visit Cuba as
soon as possible.

So, it may be that in the midst of all this
stress, due to constant freedom, he finds
something to anchor him in an unchangeable recollection he has stored in
his memory. How he lived in Cuba, a
decades old, shocking panorama, becomes something to quietly hold on to,
an oasis. More over, it may be the case
that this recollection of a pigpen is immediately invaded by imagination. The
depressing memory is adorned as a reaction to the abundance, colors, designs
and offers a new reality that surrounds
him.

It took three whole years for them to be
able to go back. Marta unashamedly
confessed to me that as soon as they
landed and deplaned, she kissed the
ground. She felt free of what seemed
like eternal anguish and ready to enjoy
their month-long stay. “We even though
of staying in Cuba,” she told me and
blushed, but things weren’t like they
thought they’d be.
When they got to their parents’ house, it
ended up being too tight, dirty, having
old or badly repaired furniture. This
what not what they remembered, nor
did they recall that one had to save and
store water because the pipe that supplied the neighborhood only put out
water 12 out of every 48 hours. Their
parents were much older and poorer
than they expected, and her sister had a
boyfriend living with her in the room
that had belonged to the two of them.

“This is the most beautiful land ever
seen by human eyes”
Marta immigrated to the United States
in 1999. She was one of 541,000 people
who signed up for the 1998 bombo [the
Cuban lottery], a visa lottery for Cuban
immigrants offered by the United States
for a few years. Marta confessed to me
that she and her husband increasingly
wanted to leave the country. That’s why

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