Get out of Cuba for the first time and land in the world - Catopardo

Get out of Cuba for the first time and land in the world - Catopardo

I was not prepared for my last house arrest in Cuba. I wasn't because somehow, in my head, I had already left Cuba at the time when several agents and policemen surrounded my house to prevent me from going out to cover the protests on November 15.

That passage brought me back to reality: I was still on the island.

The following days were an acute crisis of anguish and anxiety, a discomfort that my body had never felt before. My head stopped working and my actions were taken over by an irrepressible rage. Later I learned from my therapist that anger is the other side of sadness.

Since June 2016, an immigration regulation from the Cuban regime weighed on me that prevented me from traveling abroad. "Immigration regulation" is the term that Castroism invented to punish individuals for political reasons that make it uncomfortable and through this provision it prevents the greatest desire of Cubans — without taking into account the end of the dictatorship: to leave the country. . It is not that Cubans dream of traveling more than the rest of the inhabitants of this planet, it is that it is the only way they have to progress, or to breathe, and then return with a full tank to plunge into the dark well of totalitarianism.

For more than five years that was the government's strategy to push me to stop doing journalism, or at least the one that hurt me the most. Even above the frequent house arrests, the arbitrary interrogations, the express kidnappings, the harassment of my family and friends, the threats of imprisonment, the discredit in the official media and the intervention of my private communication. That kind of political prison on the island, where independent journalists are treated like terrorists, the violation of the right that all citizens have to free mobility, made me live all this time with the frustration of not knowing any other reality that was not the Cuban

Before entering that “damn list” in 2016, which according to the Patmos Institute has 247 people —it was last updated in March 2020—, it had not left the country because it was not until 2013 that Cubans were able to travel freely. Before that, to leave Cuba you had to request a travel "permit" from the government and it was the government who decided who did it and who didn't. When the right to travel was released, the passport cost about 100 dollars. An unattainable figure for me at that moment, in which I earned about three dollars per story in OnCuba magazine.

Castroism's favorite repressive weapon against civil society during the last two decades was immigration regulations. But they used it so much that they ended up boycotting themselves by canning so many outraged people — already with the Internet weapon in their hands — inside the country. One day the pressure cooker exploded and from there the largest popular anti-government protests in the 63 years of Castroism were born. Seeing the country in the streets and not being able to disguise the discontent of the entire nation, the regime had no choice but to change its repressive strategy: now its script is to empty the island of discontent, instead of accumulating it. Freedom in exchange for exile. In this way, almost all of the contesting civil society that was formed after the arrival of the internet in 2015 has had to leave the country forcibly and those who have not done so find themselves either in prison or tied up by tentacles. of government.

After witnessing only as a spectator the parade of artists, dissidents, activists and professional colleagues who have fled en masse in recent months, I came to believe that the regime was never going to back down to free me. Not because something in particular insinuated it to me, but because people tend to think that the worst misfortunes happen to oneself.

Weeks ago an unidentified caller came into my phone. A man who didn't even introduce himself was yelling at me. I didn't understand anything he was saying. I was about to hang up when I heard the word “passport”. At that moment I remembered that the times that State Security —the repressive organ of Castroism— has called me by phone to threaten me or to summon me for questioning in police units, the calls always come from unidentified numbers. So, I asked the man who he was. To which he responded with more than shouts of which I could only decipher the phrase: “don't you understand?, that you can already have a passport, that you can go look for it now!” After hearing that I didn't know what to say and to my silence the man responded with a question: "Aren't you going to thank me?" I don't have to thank anyone for a right that has been stolen from me, I said. And I hung up.

I sat in the living room of the house. He was neither happy nor surprised. I was simply processing that passage that, although I had waited so long, now it was time to digest. Perhaps, if that man had not asked me the question, everything would have fit better for me. But that “are you not going to thank me?” It made me feel like a wretch, like a slave, like a crushed person, as, ultimately, they —the regime— classify the “counterrevolutionaries”: a worm.

Life in Cuba is absurd and one has no choice but to accept or adapt to that madness. We Cubans have naturalized oppression. To check it out, go back to the first sentence of this text and read it again. It is this: I was not prepared for my last house arrest in Cuba. Whoever writes something like this has already assumed as normal that any day you can wake up arbitrarily in house arrest. Whoever writes something like this does so from total legal helplessness. Whoever writes something like this does it to vent and denounce such an outrage, because writing is the only thing left to defend himself.

In fact, the idea of ​​this column, which was born in June 2018, was precisely that: to narrate my experiences being trapped on the island. My editor, Alejandra González Romo, came up with the idea and I will be eternally grateful to her because writing about my sorrows gave me the chance to experience them in a different way. When he made the proposal to me, I told him that "From the Malecón" (you can read the first text at this link) would last until he left Cuba for the first time, that once he set foot in another place, this repository of information would have to be closed. my life.

I will continue writing in Gatopardo, but no longer about my confinement, I will leave that room closed and move on to another.

Leaving Cuba for the first time and landing in the world - Gatopardo

Days after the call I decided to go to one of the offices of the Ministry of the Interior where passports are processed. He wanted to see if it was true that he was no longer “regulated”. At that time, Cuba still had a curfew imposed due to the pandemic that lasted from 9:00 pm to 5:00 am. I left home before 5:00 am with some coffee in a disposable cup. At that time there were already many people piling up outside the shops and markets to be the first to buy what little is on offer. I got to the office at 5:10 am and was the sixth to arrive. Little by little, the surroundings of the place became crowded with people who, like me, wanted to get their passport or extend it to escape the —medieval— state of the country. At 8:00 am it was my turn to go through. I was skeptical when a sleepy lady asked me for my ID and entered my details into a computer. Other times I had passed through here and they had always told me that it was "regulated" and that they could not make me a passport. This time, after yawning, the lady, without looking up, held out my identity card and told me: "Go to the other room to have your fingerprints taken." That meant that the process was already inside, that what the screaming man said was true. I finished with some joy all the paperwork. And they told me to come back in fifteen days to get my passport.

In fifteen days I returned. I got up just before 5:00 am again and left the house with coffee. This time I started further back in line. When they mentioned my name and I went up to the booth and a man handed me that little blue booklet that says Republic of Cuba on the outside, I couldn't believe it. The amazing thing was that those bound pages meant so much to me.

A few days later I received an invitation from the Netherlands to give a series of lectures and workshops in Amsterdam on journalism and freedom of expression. Like this one, throughout all the previous years I had received lots of invitations that I never got to attend. To some extent, the depression I suffer from began there: seeing that I couldn't attend courses and workshops that could help my professional development, seeing people freely enjoying festivals and forums, seeing people breathe outside from Cuba.

I arrived at the Dutch embassy and they let me in. We had a few waiting to apply for the visa. When the woman in front of me was being attended to, an official told me to go to the bathroom to wash my hands before going to the booth to deliver my documents. It was part of the health protocol that the embassy was implementing due to the pandemic. I entered the bathroom and felt for the first time that I was not in Cuba. I have never been in such a big bathroom before, so nice. It was a huge space with a toilet in one corner and a sink in another. The floor shone to the point that it clearly reflected my image and I didn't need to look in the mirror that was hung on one of the walls. The place smelled like anything but a bathroom. I washed my hands and, to my surprise, I didn't see what to dry them with. I suddenly discovered a plastic device that was on one of the sides of the sink and I sensed that this could be the object that appears in the movies and that blows air to dry the hands. I didn't know how to make it work, I even hit it a few times on top, I suppose I remembered my childhood when black and white televisions lost their signal and one got up from the seat to hit the casing so that the image could be composed. I spent so much time trying to dry my hands that the official knocked on the door and said from outside: sir, you can come in now. Hearing those words made me nervous and the hasty solution I found was to grab the toilet paper roll to dry my hands. Each of my fingers was chalked with paper, my hands looked like those of a mummy that had just been unearthed. I left the bathroom and presented myself at the paperwork box.

I was served by a super nice girl who must have seen my nervous face because her first words were: “is this your first time?” After answering some questions and handing her the documents she requested, she asked me to place my fingers in a fingerprint scanner. When I did, the device turned off. My fingers were wet and with pieces of paper. The friendly girl didn't understand what was happening and I told her that I didn't either, hiding my hands behind my body. I took advantage of the fact that she got up and began to walk in the device to clean my hands on my pants. After a while, the scanner turned back on. Luckily the second time it worked.

I left the embassy with the strange sensation of living my last days in Cuba. It is not a final decision, but I did decide that I am leaving for a long time. I need, above all things, to take care of my mental health now and to heal all the wounds that Castroism has caused to my body. The last time I spent there has been very hard. Not even because of the repression of the regime, I already said that, sadly, even that one gets used to. The hardest thing has been loneliness: seeing all my friends leave, the ones from the neighborhood, the ones from the university, my colleagues, and seeing the few who stayed away, for not being implicated in my reprisals.

For months I only had close family to talk to, plus no one, because I had no one to do it with. The only thing he did besides that was go jogging and walking. Walking through the streets of a country of ghosts.

The loneliest I felt was after the 72 hours that the last house arrest lasted. Anxiety attacks were cornering me and I needed to get some air, talk to someone other than my family, because anxiety attacks when they are severe not only affect you, but everyone around you. I went out for a walk aimlessly and suddenly discovered that I was in front of the José Martí stadium. It is a sports facility that is located in front of the Havana boardwalk and is in ruins. That was where every week the friends from the university played soccer. I asked the custodian on duty for permission to enter, because access is prohibited due to its calamitous state. Carefully, I climbed onto the stands and sat there for a while, looking out over the abandoned ground and the shattered stands. I took a couple of photos for the memory and left. Going out the door, the custodian told me: “this is a cemetery, brother”.

A few hours later, the trip to Amsterdam was postponed until February due to various setbacks. Once again, fate denied me the exit. The blow was a blow that sharpened my bad mental state. Since weeks ago, since I had no one to say goodbye to in Havana, I had begun to say goodbye to the city itself. I went out every morning and every afternoon to those cliché places where only tourists go —taking advantage of the fact that there are none now due to the pandemic— to see them for the last time and when I returned I always sat for a while on the boardwalk, my favorite place in Cuba. . I was already on the exit ramp and now they were stopping me again. I felt as if something superhuman didn't want me to leave the island and that I would be stranded there forever. For the first time in my life I had to take antidepressants and anxiolytics. I was broken.

The worst were the nights: I spent them dreaming, images after images, passages after passages, all isolated and all related to being locked up, not being able to escape, with my family, total madness. I would get up in the middle of the morning sweating, agitated and then I could not go back to sleep for fear of dreaming those unpleasant scenes again.

With the visa stamped in my passport and with the threat of the advance in the world of the omicron variant, I decided then to go to Spain to wait there for the February event to arrive in the Netherlands. I was afraid that the borders would close again and I would be trapped once more. Every second more on the island was something he had to fight through gritted teeth.

The day that would change my life I arrived at the airport and at the gate I ran into several State Security agents posing as civilians. I recognized them because they had been following me a few meters away since I got out of the taxi and because one of them was the agent who told me in November that I was under house arrest. The guys in addition to following me did not stop talking on the phone. That made me nervous and I thought for a moment that they would not let me out. An added value to my inexperience in airports.

At customs I made the whole line crowd behind me because I didn't know I had to get rid of all the technological and metallic gadgets and I put my things in several small plastic boxes instead of one. Then I ran after them because I thought that once they passed the tunnel they would fall to the ground, which made a lot of people laugh at me. I also did not know that I had to go through the X-ray arch and when I went to the side the customs officers took me by the hand to indicate where I should cross. Luckily, in the waiting room I managed to relax a bit. When it was time to board the plane and I accepted myself inside, I knew that I had made it.

Leaving Cuba is not the same as leaving any other country for the first time. To leave Cuba is to fall into the world, to verify that an island has been kidnapped by a political system that has caused the country to remain at some point in the 20th century. Being Cuban is an arduous condition. That was the first thing I felt as soon as I set foot in the Madrid airport: opening the door to another world.

In the Spanish capital I made a stopover to travel to Barcelona, ​​where I am now. Since I arrived I feel that I am an ethereal body. I'm like eclipsed, overwhelmed by so many strange sensations that are eating my head. I have nausea all the time, my temple wants to explode. There are times when I feel too volatile, when I'm a zombie. Everything I see seems far away and surreal, as if I were in a movie.

After a week I understood what this headache is due to: my eyes don't rest, they look at everything, every detail. I go down the street and look at every bar, every cafeteria, every restaurant, the huge, colorful signs, every store, every business, every building, every person, every person and their different clothes, every person and the language they speak. Being so aware of so much information has me enthralled. My eyes, which come from a gray and monolithic reality, a reality where there is no variety, are overloaded.

When I entered a bookstore for the first time in the El Raval neighborhood. The shelves crammed from floor to ceiling with titles, and the many rooms packed with those shelves, scared me. I was trying to read the titles and couldn't. The letters jumped at me, my vision was diluted. Suddenly, I had the feeling that one of those shelves might collapse and crush me. I ran away. I fled with a pounding heart. I sat outside on a bench and looking at some pigeons, I realized that what had happened to me inside the bookstore, that specific passage, was what was happening to me with this whole new world.

This is my first time being a foreigner. And I feel so foreign, so distant from the reality that I am treading on, that perhaps I will never become part of this world.

I stare at people in the street as if they were exotic animals. I don't really know what it is that catches my attention, although I think it's how they dress. Because it is very contrasting to how people dress in Cuba. Obviously, if people don't even have enough to eat, what will they have to wear? I am also very impressed by dogs. Dogs of breeds he had only seen in movies. I told this to a friend from the university that I had not seen for more than seven years and who is here in Barcelona and he told me: “the difference is not so much the breeds of the dogs, but rather that the dogs here are noble and the from Cuba they are always loaded —aggressive in Cuban neighborhood slang.

I'm so overwhelmed that I've lost my appetite—and I think I'm weighty, too. I don't eat, I don't feel like eating food. I always thought that when I faced these giant markets, these stores, I would dive right into the food. Because if we Cubans suffer from something, it is scarcity. In Cuba either you don't eat or you eat very badly. But the variety and quantity of things here is so impressive that my body has opted for the opposite: crappy nothing. The two or three times that I have entered a food market I have ended up looking at the floor and quickening my pace to escape. That amount of everything stuns me. I come from a place where you eat what appears and I am still processing how to choose between so many yogurts, between so many juices, between so much everything.

The same has happened to me with stores. We are in winter and I did not have clothes for this climate, because the Caribbean winter is 25 degrees Celsius. The clothes that I wear now are borrowed and I will continue with them until I can get up the courage to go into a store to choose some other item of clothing. I say value because I am afraid of stores. I have passed outside many, walking, and I only dare to look at them out of the corner of my eye. I am intimidated by so much product, so many mannequins.

In a week I've almost been run over three times already. I have been close to being the victim of a bicycle or a scooter —in Cuba it would be an electric stroller. I didn't know there was an exclusive lane for cycles and I have walked through them. On the other hand, it was less difficult for me to discover that in each street there is a pedestrian traffic light, even in the small streets. Although it's still hard for me to cross the big avenues, because when the green light appears and on each side of the avenue the crowd of people waiting to cross shoot out, I end up bumping into people, because I'm not adapted to seeing someone coming from the front. and not move. It is difficult for me to keep my step in a straight line if someone comes towards me, then, in the middle of the avenue I start to dodge people and I find myself entangled in a tidal wave of bodies that look at me with the face of: “and what is this man doing”.

A couple of days ago a friend invited me to his house for a few drinks at night. I took the opportunity to dare to ride the subway alone without anyone helping me: a kind of challenge. I went downstairs, made sure where I was going and prepared to enter. The transport card did not work for me. I didn't know why. People ran past me and put the card under the machine, I was doing it on top. When I got it right, the machine sucked my card at a speed that scared me. I felt like a dog bit me, I jumped. Then, it took me so long to react that the door closed and the machine had already charged the ticket. I tried to go through one of the other entrances, but for that you have to wait 15 minutes —which I found out later. I went to the attention booth—I hope it's called that—and I explained to a lady what had happened to me. She understood and with one of her cards she opened the entrance for me. I went downstairs and soon the subway arrived. But I wondered if that was really the one I had to take to go to my friend's house. I asked a man and he told me it wasn't that one. I crossed to the opposite direction of the station by some stairs. I checked the map and couldn't find the destination I was going to. I got too nervous there, underground, and decided to go out and take a taxi.

At my friend's house I had several beers and it was midnight. I didn't want it to be so late to go back because I wanted to do it on my own two feet. I put the Google Maps and went out. For some reason the doll on the map was moving in the opposite direction that I thought I was walking. I walked the same section for fifteen minutes: a pedestrian crossing that I crossed back and forth a lot of times. I was walking to the left and the avatar was walking to the right. He did it to the right and the doll moved to the left. There was no way to match the map to my course. Desperate and annoyed, I yelled a very Cuban obscenity into the air. A man and a woman walking past me stopped. “Cuban?” they asked me. "Yes, I'm lost," I replied sadly. They took my phone in their hands and told me how to correct the path.

They accompanied me a few blocks where they told me that they had not been to the island for more than 10 years and that they were thinking of going soon.

We said goodbye and I felt cold. I looked at the phone to find the temperature: 3 degrees Celsius. When I walked again, the lights of a light sign dazzled my sight. It said: New life. It was an advertisement for a wine.

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