17: Alma Mater, All matters

During my five years at the university (I am a biochemist), there was never a spontaneous student demonstration. It was the ‘90s, and in Cuba we had a world of things to oppose and protest. But we were paralyzed by a kind of collective inertia. Or perhaps even then we were very wise. Or very hypocritical. Aged young people.

We saw many students and teachers expelled simply for expressing their political opinions peacefully. We were incapable of the slightest gesture of solidarity, despite being ravenously hungry in the dining hall, and coming and going on foot in our beggar’s rags because urban transport had disappeared overnight. We burned with desire to get to our future. We didn’t want to die while Fidel still lived. We were anxious to know another Havana, another Cuba, another Revolution. We recognized one another instantly. We looked into each other’s eyes and in a corner of the classroom said, with no need to speak, “Stop looking at me now, because I’m falling in love with you.”

After the last class, the university steps smelled like reefs and sunken dampness, surrounded as they were by those “rare green tiny fruit trees” that Carlos Varela sang to us about, that magnificent gnome of the Novísima Trova, the newest troubadours, of our generation.

Dusk in El Vedado and “you and that white flowered skirt look like eternity,” in the unforgettable verse of our forgotten poet Alberto Edel Morales. Only the statue of Alma Mater stays young there, gazing out at so much virginity of body and spirit.