2: Back in the USSR

We used to call the Russians in Cuba bolos. With their clumsy silhouettes that’s what they looked like to us: bowling pins. We didn’t like their odor, unshaven armpits, or imported breath. We didn’t like their labyrinthine language, as gray as it was gross, like we liked the “silly love songs” we all tra-la-la’d in English in resistance to the official discourse. We didn’t like their raggedy clothes, nor their privileges as first-class citizens in a country where even logos were considered subversive, where Cubans all looked so insipid and insultingly equal.

We suffered from Russophobia, even as we went to the Soviet Union to study and fall in love and bring back our so-called “warm water” descendants and, of course, to train ourselves in the terrifying techniques of the KGB, whose prodigal Caribbean daughter—Cuban State Security, or “G2”—is all that remains today on the USSR’s former satellite island. How many Cubans today could say, without error, what the initials USSR stand for? Do you remember? Or perhaps the broom of forgetfulness has already swept away their meaning?