Days Of Bread And Water
by Theresa Cecilia Garcia-Newbill
When Isabel left Cuba there was no conscience or coincidence involved behind the lagged perceptions of the reality.She was tired of the Communist propaganda and the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world reduced to rubble left by Castro’s armies of rebels. Her people were defeated, lice-infested and starving and where common decency and flexability once lived, human trafficking, and fear hanging on every tongue in every window reached levels of congestion that compressed into a single body of flesh. When she reached the port it was a carnival scene but bongo drums and a wild crowd weren’t dancing chaotically. They were gathered together that day to rummage through the belongings of those seeking departure. The musical rhythm of voices in unison yelling “traitors and pigs” resounded in the ears of the departed who abandoned the wharves at dawn in droves.
“Ha, ha, ha! Go to hell!” was her response to the shoves and spitting crowd as she cut through to Passport control.
“What’s bitten you?” He said,as he carefully examined the document. She will never forget the sound of his voice or his disreputable demeanor. In all socialist societies there was the same type of man at the disposal of the common folk and in charge of similar singular duties.
“You! if you help me get off this God-forsaken island.” The deal was a defensive preparation for what she knew was to come but being the one to initiate the bargain gave her the pseudo kind of control she needed. Flexability was the name of the game in Cuba. Flexability to talk to yourself and internalize your thoughts without speaking them,flexability to become the minority, flexability to screw a dilettante official that was the torturer, philosopher and politican of many innumerable sons of good families. Flexability to leave and live your own life.
“I like it when women like you become vulgar,that always excites me, when I see you all struggle between rich elegance and vulgarity.” Everything became the same in Cuba especially after they burned down El Encanto and replaced it with a billboard quotation from the Second Declaration of Havana, read by Fidel in 1962, spelling out the goals of the Cuban Revolution…”This great humanity has said enough and has started to move forward.”
As the ship left Hemingway’s Marina she surveyed the scene and thought about the political slogan.
Now, years later in Miami she sees young men and women wearing Che Guevara T-Shirts and bashing the president of the United States.They call this expandability, opening your eyes to the different notions of freedom. Isabel listens to them and she remembers. She remembers how the rebel commanders exploited that expandability and betrayed a people. She remembers how that expandability led to the murders of countless innocents. Murders that permitted the existence of those not directly involved in the contact of the deaths yet just as guilty. And as Isabelle sits, observes and ponders a life full of flexabilities and expandabilities , she sees that everything is the same. Here, there, everything is the same. A luxury playground will soon give way again to generations that will clink their drinks and wonder what the fuss was all about on the backdrop of a set city in cardboard where no one has anything left to say.