9: The White Spring

The color of purity is white, which is nothing more than the optical mixing of every color. There is hope in this purity where all Cubans fit peacefully.

With their leader and martyr Laura Pollán in their hearts, the Ladies in White walk through Havana every Sunday after mass, gladiators with gladioli held high for human rights. The Castro brothers’ political police pay mobs of workers to confront them. They shout insults, spit on them, drag them, and beat them as they are arrested without charges. They have even injected them with unknown substances in the midst of these so-called “acts of repudiation,” a Castro plagiarism of George Orwell’s “two minutes of hate” from his novel 1984, published when Laura Pollán had barely been born.

The only time I took pictures of these ambassadors of good will for a Democratic Transition in Cuba, “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.” They didn’t know me, and I think they confused me with State Security’s personal paparazzi, who spy for perks and pay. I captured the women’s gazes caught between nervousness and defiance. An instant later, hearing them chant “Libertad, libertad” under the clock tower on Fifteenth Avenue in Miramar, my tears prevented me from focusing my camera. I was crying without realizing it. Over the course of my whole life, I had never heard anyone say, loudly and with such pride, that precious word: Freedom…

T.S. Eliot was wrong: April is not always the cruelest month. With the spring, the plural purity of our hope is resuscitated.