I returned to Havana last Wednesday night, after a three-week “vacation” in Montreal with my children. Since Air Transat has stopped its flights to Havana until the cold season, I had to take a flight to Varadero, then a bus to Havana. Since the Air Transat flight was late in the evening and the last bus to Havana left around 5 p.m., I had to fall back on Air Canada to make the two times coincide. I was expecting the worst, but I was treated to bilingual service, with French taking priority. Thank you.
Back in my cottage, I found my old things, with surprise guests. In the kitchen, the ants were calling the shots. They had invaded my sugar bowl and colonized all the little cracks in the counter. So I went hunting for ants, but the war is likely to be very long, without an ant trap. Do you have anything to suggest?
You always feel a little lost when you arrive in another world, a third world especially, completely different from the first world I come from. A feeling of both familiarity and strangeness. The differences are too numerous to list them all. If the first thing Cubans who emigrate to the United States do is to film supermarkets filled with all sorts of products and send these images of abundance to their families who remain behind, here, what some dirty minds do is to film the poverty that still reigns in certain neighborhoods of Havana, with its piles of garbage on street corners, its queues in front of bank ATMs, its collapsed houses due to lack of proper maintenance and because of the saltpeter that sweeps the buildings located near the sea.
There is something unhealthy about filming these desolate landscapes, these sidewalks torn up in several places, as if these images proved the failure of socialism, when in reality, it is the victory of colonialism and the plundering of wealth that is exposed here in its simplest expression. Centuries of plunder, racism, slavery, humiliation, dispossession, exclusion, beatings, extermination of indigenous populations have left indelible marks, and not only in nature, but also in mentalities. As here in Cuba, as in Haiti, and as in the majority of Latin American countries, where people dream of reaching Eden, in the United States, this paradise of unbridled consumption. As if democracy were summed up in being able to choose between 50 kinds of cereals, cookies, chips, ice cream or soft drinks. Given the choice between Trump and Biden, two unrepentant warmongers (in a recent speech, Trump promised to end Cuba if he is re-elected!), it is as if happiness and prosperity absolutely had to come through the free market and excessive consumption.
In Cuba, for over sixty years, we have cultivated other values. Mutual aid and solidarity, for example. And this is probably what motivates me the most to return to Cuba, despite its deficiencies, its shortages, its power outages, its difficulties of all kinds. The feeling of feeling useful. I don’t say indispensable, no, simply useful. Useful around me, among my neighbors. And the sharing of Cuban values: mutual aid and solidarity.
Finally, I believe that human beings are made to live in the best of both worlds. As a Quebecer, I will always love my country, it is even a duty, and I will defend it tooth and nail. But I also have another world, Cuba, where I draw a good part of my energy to continue moving forward in this increasingly worrying life. A little bit of Quebec, a little bit of Cuba, the ideal cocktail for me. ¡Salud!