At The Edge of Your Eyes

   When the small corroded gate was opened, a hiss of warm air entered my cell accompanied by the sound of distant laughter and foreign voices.  On my way out of the maximum security complex at El Morro,  Officer Mauro Batista, grandson of a political prisoner who spent  20 years in confinement at the same cell where I spent 20 minutes, escorted me out in silence.  With slow gait, greasy hair and deep eyes, Officer Batista -as everyone called him- was not a prison guard, but a respected tour guide and a journalist for the Communist Party leaded now by Raul Castro in Cuba.  Initially, his simple assignment, to serve as my tour guide and escort, served two purposes as he openly admitted; to provide me with accurate historical facts and to keep a close eye on me.  While walking out of what once was the maximum security complex, where time seemed to have been forgotten and where decades ago, even glancing a dim ray of sunlight could had been interpreted as a miracle, I couldn’t help to look up to the humid and deteriorated ceiling of the old jailhouse turned tourist attraction, noticing small openings high atop the brick walls every ten meters or so that allowed a small area of gray sky to décor its aged walls, bringing beautiful yet foreign images of the world that once evolved outside. 

El Morro, no longer a stronghold, a fortress or a jail, is still to this day one of the most intriguing and patrimonial structures in La Habana.  Between its walls, hundreds of voices were once silenced, countless words were erased, ideas were oppressed and the thin gray line that usually divides martyrdom from torture turned red in favor of the revolution. 

La Habana is a place of contrasts.  It’s opaque façade under its unique sibylline sky has served for decades as the canvas to a crescent buttoned up avant-garde anti-government artistic movement. Discretely concealed and passed on in poems, essays and even songs, they share them as sliced reveries limited to a bare dinner table (where there is one worthwhile).   In the real Habana, you may find mambo and silence served the same way they serve rum and cola, with no ice and in unison.  In a city where all sounds, even silence, are louder than the city itself and where the most intense and delicate flavors are a result of love and conformism, it is fascinating how much life and vitality there still is.

After working on my story for the most part of the day, I found myself striding through “La Habana Vieja” as it is commonly known, and, I couldn’t stop noticing the way people looked at me. Their weary eyes were almost impossible to decipher, as if a thick invisible wall were in between.  It grasped me like a baritone would if singing next to me the most vehement “chanson triste” while having his mouth covered by a thick dark cloth. Still, there were remnants of pride behind every gaze and even happiness. 

Walking through La Habana vieja, where even a discreet warm afternoon Sun was able to burn my forehead in a matter of minutes and the dense humid air forces inhaled slowly made me feel alive and in peace, an unfamiliar and vague sense of expectation slowed me down for a moment.  For some reason in Cuba, all these sensations came naturally and unsought.  The battered buildings and the unwrapped houses, the enigmatic cathedrals and the empty markets, the old cars and the unpaved roads they mutter. They sing and the sound comes from beneath the tiles of every "historic landmark", now consigned to oblivion.  The sound of my boots over the cobblestones, the bitter music of an off-key piano and the Rumba coming from the houses nearby, a baby’s laughter and the hammering sound on a wooden wall mutating with the air and finding its way between the old buildings and finally embracing me.  The people’s eyes, the eyes of my tour guide following me close behind and the eyes of a little girl playing with a headless doll at the side of the street, it all served as the prelude to his dark metallic gaze, fixed at the distance.  High atop at the Ministry of the Interior building, facing the city and the sea, his defiant gaze still dare to challenge.  Now from a wall and firm to the horizon, the monument of Ernesto Guevara, who once served  the revolution and their governance as the Minister of Economy, still looks contumaciously yet peaceful somewhere out to the sea, as if expecting something that never came,  still waiting hopefully for a moving north.  It was also in these narrow streets where my father once found asylum and refuge after history repeated itself in Argentina, almost 20 years after it took place here.  It was under this very sky, somewhere between these decadent walls where he wrote his first unsent letter, a letter that instead of reaching its recipient, stayed with him for his own sake, or the other way around.  It wasn’t here where it all began but where it started to be written.  

Back at the hotel room (the only place where it felt like I wasn’t there at all), I sat down at the edge of a small bed and lowered my head to catch my breath.  A moment later, I got up and walked to the balcony.  From there, where all sounds but the whisper of the wind and distant waves from below a moonless night seemed to have vanished, I found him again.  And while his blurred figure paid me one last visit, walking on the street below, with no direction and tired steps, I shook my head on an attempt  to come back to my senses.  I rubbed my eyes in an effort to turn my attention into something different and through my fingers I slowly looked away.  I searched in my jacket inside pocket and found an old letter from him, one that I have been carrying for quite a long time, perhaps the first one written from this very room, maybe the only one that found its own way out a long time ago.  How could I ever know?here is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose, nothing to live for and nothing to

For many years now I have been following his footsteps in order to find mine.  The letter narrates the story of a nameless woman who he entrusted the rest of his notes before disappearing once again, leaving his story -which is also my own- to an anonymous figure.  For many years now I have silently dedicated my life trying to find her.  Several years ago, I had a dream where a mysterious figure of a woman carrying a handful of letters gave me a peculiar yet ambiguous location to meet her.  She asked me to meet her 20 years after that dream. I still remember clearly the name of the city, I simply have to find my will. One thing is for certain, that story is yet to be written. In a world where most people go after promises and certainty, I took the road less traveled.  I started this journey with my lungs full  of air and today I added the sunburn in my forehead.  I have gathered in my back-pack so many images arrayed of such amazing sounds...  I feel alive.  It was in an afternoon like this, twenty years ago, where I decided to be guided by my instincts and to fuel each step with hope.  For now, I continue to follow in circles my own footsteps until the moment that I can name her.

From there, while still attempting to clear my mind, she came back and for an instant -from the street below-she pointed to the horizon and then vanished. When I slowly turned my head towards where she had signaled, everything came to a halt.  Ernesto’s dark metallic eyes caught up with mine in complicity for a long while, and, in a beam of relevation, suddenly everything came lucent. I realized where to look, where to find them, how to find myself, not to the distance: inside...  Inside

Breaking out of the circle where I have chase my own footsteps never felt so inviting, so captivating. Now I  finally understand that after this long journey, even when everything seems to fade away, it remains within my reach.

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