THE EVICTION

It was also in 1983 that the owner of the building in which I lived attempted to evict all the tenants; he wanted to empty the building in order to remodel it and raise the rents. During the war between the landlord and the tenants, the landlord managed to damage the roof of the building. Rain and snow were coming into my room. It is difficult to wage war against the powerful, especially for someone who is not living in his own country, does not know the language, and is not familiar with legal terms. I finally had to give up my one-room apartment. I was then transferred to an old building, not far from my previous one. In this country it is perfectly normal for people to move frequently, but a major problem I had to suffer in Cuba was having nowhere to live: having to be on the move all the time, having to live with the fear of being forced out at whim, never having a place I could call my own. Now in New York it was the same story. I had no choice but to take my belongings and move to the new hovel. I was later told that the people who had stuck it out in the building were paid by the owner up to twenty thousand dollars to move out. My new world was ruled not by political power but by another power, also sinister: the power of money. After having lived in this country for some years, I realize that it is a country without a soul: everything revolves around money.

New York has no tradition, no history; there can be no history where there are no memories to hold on to. The city is in constant flux, constant construction, constant tearing down and building up again; a supermarket yesterday is a produce store today, a movie house tomorrow, and a bank the day after. The city is a huge, soulless factory with no place for the pedestrian to rest, no place where one can simply be without dishing out dollars for a breath of air or a chair on which to sit down and relax.