25: My father, who has no homeland

I was my father’s grandson. He was called Dionisio Manuel, and he was fifty-two years old when I was born, on December 10, 1971, the International Day of Human Rights. My father left me two homelands much more durable than Cuba: chess and English. Those two secret universes opened my mind to the labyrinth beyond, in a Havana of claustrophobias and State crimes, all in the sacrosanct name of the Revolution.

My father smelled of centuries of nicotine, an aroma I still miss. He smiled with a wisdom he borrowed from God, in whom, at heart, he could not believe. He never punished me. He never went to a hospital—except as a cadaver on a filthy stretcher to the former Quinta Benéfica. He had a merciful metastasis that never caused him pain. Or he never complained. He was stoic, a hero of the home and not of the despotic plazas of the proletariat. He was contemptuous of Fidel and died at eighty-one on Fidel’s seventy-fourth birthday. He warned me not to talk about politics so much in public. Dionisio Manuel was right: all around me were spies.

Our poverty in the nineties nearly pushed him out into the street to look for a few centavos above his burlesque pension of five dollars a month. My only consolation is that I managed to stop him. My father never had to drag himself through the abandonment of the Cuban streets or suffer police harassment for reselling flowers or newspapers without a beggar’s license. My father didn’t have to end his days under the sun as harsh as the eyes of our deranged city. My father never learned to say “La Revolución” with conviction, but his eyes would tear up whenever he whispered, “La Habana…”