24: The trumpet’s sound of silence

Cuban cemeteries are beautiful. For more than half a century, our families haven’t built funeral memorials—only the officials do and they’re horrendous. Though eaten away by natural forces and vandalism, those that still stand from before are very beautiful. Death has this gift of eternity, and it is not devalued. Torches facedown, angels alighting in the sadness of the recently dead, tunics unmoving. Christs with empty marble eyes, staring blankly. Pyramids, esoteric signs, lions and swans, stone flowers than can never rot. Plaques with more than a thousand and one delicate dedications: to mima, to pipo, to our nené, we will never forget you… Our language doesn’t allow us to express more. Death, like love, is that simple.

I go to cemeteries like I enter my house. One day I would like to do it naked, my skin in contact with the earth that will one day caress me. Cuban burial grounds are our last territory for sincerity, a place where the historic little social games end. Capitalism and communism and the rest of human violence and stupidity are left outside the gates. There is neither nation nor notion of progress. The flag is a shroud, the shield an epitaph, the anthem simply ridiculous: the trumpet sounds the call, to arms, brave sons, run…

I am aware, there, of the temporary privilege of being a witness. I am unique, but I continue here. No one in the world could fill my place now, in this end-of-an-epoch debacle and the beginning of nothing. The poet Eliseo Diego put it into words for me: “It is not by chance that we are born in one place or another, but to bear witness.”