14: Half a century or half a millennium of loneliness

“What can the sun do with such a sad people?” asks the disheartening verse from the Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera in “The Weight of the Island.” We Cubans are indeed invisible, subtle beings, languid although condemned to behave like wild horses under the vertical salvos of the sun scorching our heads, lead puppets melting over the asphalt. The sun and heat make it impossible to think. But we also have our Novembers. The autumn sky of Havana is a low lilac cream you can almost touch almost taste, with the brilliant aroma of electricity. The sea rears up, and the citizenry calms down and hides. Only the police and the statues are left outside, indistinguishable at certain hours of the day, when no one can tell whether it is Monday morning or late Friday afternoon.

In the fall, the Cuban solitude thickens and weighs on our dead memory of fifty or five hundred years. People are left in a pristine state of loneliness. Each one is one alone. And if we add each one to the next and the next and so on to the 11 million, the final result would be one again: a mathematical miracle. It is then that the rawness in my nation’s intimate soul expresses itself: a post-totalitarian sadness, a beauty moved to tears, the institutional laid bare, the helplessness of god, the uneasiness of the uninhabitants of a Havana that has havandoned us. And so November is the only month of the year when a Cuban can fall in love with another Cuban.