Narratives On Cuba: Black, White, and Things: Abrázame

Cuba is surrealism - an abstract painting, a labyrinth, unexplainable in words. Sometimes a hallway of horror, other times, fictions through the looking glass. And after many events of strange happenings and peculiar situations, they become familiar, accepting them as a new reality, purposely feeding the chaos, so those here and now moments are all the more surreal.  

Yet, the sweetness are in the eyes of the youth, the taste of a mango, the beauty of the Carribean, the sounds of salsa, the rhythm of the afro-cuban beat, the hours of conversation in one's home, the distilled beverage made from sugarcane, made in secret, the foreign rain, and the kindness of kiss on the cheek. The invitations to many family dinners - a feast in my honor, the foreigner - the foreign photographer, who invades their lives, photographs their families and their broken down structures, yet supported by their laughter and their love. I sit and stare, drinking their beverage made from cane. 

Often confined to a box of silent voices, whispers abound, as sentiment for the revolution dissipates like the summer rains falling on the Carribean Sea, "What can we do, but open our eyes and look beyond our window shades, beyond the iconic images of what has been left behind of our revolution, past the horizon is where our dreams lay."  

And when we dream, we dream of all things Cuban, as we accept the reality with which we are presented - government rations of beans, rice, and sugar. Despite our decaying roof-tops, our crumbled side-walks, long hot days without water and electricity, and many moments of frustration and depair, yet even chains, we Cubans still learn how to dance.  

Somehwere between melancholy, tranquility, and non-sobriety, in a place so surreal, fiction is truth. I remain silent, without a Spanish voice, invisible, a fly-on-the-wall; I leave without a trace, my existence in the here and now fade into the fiction, as I too, begin to dream in Cuban.