16: Once upon Havana

We ran barefoot in the rains of the ‘80s, fleeing junior high and then high school. We listened clandestinely to the FM broadcasts from Florida, long-playing records imported who knows how many decades earlier, and even Argentine rock, especially Charly García. We all wanted to die while making love and listening to his “Canción para mi muerte” (“Song for my Death”):

There was a time I was beautiful and truly free,

keeping all my dreams in castles of glass.

Little by little I was growing up

and my fantasies of love were fading

like soap bubbles.

I will find you one morning in my room

and you will make the bed just for two.

Before love and death, childhood: running in gangs under the rains, now of the ‘70s, with our tadpole bodies, ribs sticking out, breakdancing before there was breakdancing, sliding across the ice rink that is Havana in a downpour. That primordial joy we lost when we became sullen adults, adulterated by duty—too serious to be credible, more nothings than beings. In what sewers will those laughter-filled rains disappear? Cynicism will survive in adult acrobats of the Revolution, but where will that pure kinetic energy go?