1991: The cruelty of Castro’s Cuba

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo in Post Revolution Mondays:

1991
https://orlandolunes.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/3e494-10917573_10204889997322364_1886480999_n.jpg?w=400&h=262
Orlando, 2nd from right, and his mother María, far right, with two friends

We started university. It was Havana 1991.

One afternoon we went to sit in the stands at the university stadium. We had no desire to remain in the classroom.

At times we knew biochemistry as science-fiction, in a Biology Department where there wasn’t even distilled water.

Professors and students deserted en masse, when they could get any kind of little scholarship to study abroad. Those of us left behind, they expelled us as soon as we dared to voice an opinion. The climate was one of immeasurable cruelty. I was never sadder than when I was a Cuban student, poor and happy and with the permanent look of our indolence before so much pain. For me Castroism is this. A wasteland where healthcare and education are free, but human life is not given.

That afternoon we passed through the Calixto Garcia Hospital. When we passed the emergency room a gentleman approached me. Not the group, but he came straight to me. He was wearing a suit and tie in the summer of that Cuba in the midst of the Special Period. He grabbed me by both arms and said,

“How old are you?”

My friends reacted somewhat violently. Including my girlfriend of the time. Girlfriends are always girlfriends of the time.

They separated him from me.

But I had seen something in that sudden scene. I went to where the group had pushed the gentleman. I grabbed him by his arms.

“I’m 19,” and even gave him some more details, “I’ll be 20 in December.”

The he hugged me. Strong, deep, feeling. He smelled too strong, deep, feeling. And broke into tears on my shoulder. On my collar, my neck, on my hair which had started to look long at the beginning of the decade and the end of the millennium.

“I knew it, your same age,” he said with a voice cracked with tears. “And it almost killed me inside. I just left him dead on the same stretcher in which we brought him yesterday. Go and ask his forgiveness for me. I don’t want my son to know that his father had to see him like this.”

And he released me as abruptly as he had come.

And started walking toward the Philology Department, an oasis of Ficus or laurels or whatever they call those trees that preceded and will survive the Revolution.

I can barely remember now the exact works of that dialog. But this final phrase was syllable by syllable, this:

I don’t want my son to know that his father had to see him like this.

Nor do I.

I don’t want Cuba to know that we had to see her like this. Horrible, hateful, hypocritical, hollow.

I left. We left.

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