HOLGUÍN

While Batista’s dictatorship continued to oppress the country, the economy deteriorated, at least for poor peasants such as my grandfather or my uncles, who could seldom find work at the sugar mills as cane cutters. My uncle Rigoberto once left us for four months and we all thought he had managed to get a job at a sugar mill. He returned without a penny, sick and running a high fever. He had roamed around most of Oriente province without finding any work as a sugarcane cutter. My grandmother cured him with a special infusion.

Things got so bad that my grandfather decided to sell the farm, about a hundred acres, and move to Holguín, where he planned to open a small vegetable and fruit stand. For years my grandmother and grandfather had been wanting to sell the farm, but they could never agree on the timing. So finally they did sell it to one of my grandfather’s sons-in-law, who at the time sympathized with Batista and was well-off.

A truck came from town and everything was loaded up: bedsprings, stools, the living room rocking chairs. How my grandmother, grandfather, aunts, mother, and even I cried! In that hut with its thatched roof, where we had suffered so much hunger, we had no doubt also lived the best moments of our lives. This was perhaps the end of our period of absolute poverty and isolation, but also the end of a kind of enchantment, exultation, mystery, and freedom that we would never find again, least of all in a town like Holguín.

Holguín was for me, by then a teenager, absolute boredom. The town was flat, commercial, square, with absolutely no mystery or personality. It was hot and there was no place where one could enjoy some shade or simply let the imagination roam. The town rises out of a desolate plain, crowned at one end by a barren hill, the Hill of the Cross, so called because an enormous concrete cross had been built on its top. There were many concrete steps leading to the cross. Holguín, with that cross standing out above it, seemed like a cemetery to me; on one occasion a man was found hanging from the cross. I saw Holguín as a gigantic tomb; its low houses looked like pantheons punished by the sun.

Once, out of pure boredom, I went to Holguín’s cemetery and discovered that it resembled the entire city; the crypts were like the houses, bare and flat, only smaller; they were concrete boxes. I thought of all the people in that town, and of my own family, living so many years in those house-boxes, only to end up in these smaller boxes. I think right then I promised myself to leave that town as soon as I could, and if possible, never to return. To die far away was my dream, but to make that dream come true was not easy. Where could I go without any money? On the other hand, like so many other sinister places, the town had a certain fatal attraction; it bred a certain dispiritedness and resignation that prevented people from leaving.

I was working in a guava paste factory. I got up in the morning and started making wooden boxes into which boiling guava jam was to be poured, there to harden into bars that were later labeled “La Caridad Guava Paste” and decorated with an image of Our Lady of Charity. I do not think there was much charity on the part of the factory owner, who made us work up to twelve hours a day for one peso. On payday I would go to the movies, which was the only magical place in Holguín, the only place where one could escape from the city, at least for a few hours. On those days I went alone because I liked to enjoy the movies without having to share my excitement with anybody. I would sit in the gallinero, or top balcony, the cheapest seats, where I could sometimes see up to three movies for five cents. It was a great joy to see those people galloping over the prairies, hurling themselves down mighty rivers, or shooting each other to death, while I was dying of boredom in a town that had no ocean, no rivers, no prairies, no forests, nothing that could be of interest to me.

Perhaps influenced by those movies (mostly from the United States and Mexico) or God knows why, I started to write novels. Whenever I wasn’t going to the movies, I went home and, to the sound of my grandparents’ snoring, began writing. Sometimes dawn would come, and from the typewriter that my cousin Renán had sold me for seventeen dollars, I would go straight to the guava paste factory and continue thinking about my novels while making those wooden boxes. Often I would hammer my fingers, which quickly brought me back to reality. The boxes I made were getting worse and I was writing long and horrendous novels with titles like “How Tough Life Is” or “Good-bye, Cruel World.” As a matter of fact, I think my mother still has them in Holguín, and she claims they are the best I have ever written.

My aunts and my mother, once settled in Holguín, managed to get an electric radio. Now they could all listen at once to the same soap opera they used to hear in the country. I think those radio dramas, which I also listened to, influenced the novels I wrote when I was thirteen.