52: The Horse

A racing and draft animal. A noble beast, but capable of a rearing up and knocking you in the head with a pair of lethal kicks. Fidel Castro was The Horse, a popularly violent expression that dehumanized him as Maximum Leader and put him on another biological scale. Cuba was presided over not by a president, but by a horse: the jail was guarded by a charger.

The parks of the whole country are overflowing with horses, statues where the rider could be Don Quixote or a nineteenth-century independent Mambí general. Twenty-first–century Cuba is the stable of a half-bookish, half-military encampment. However, living on the central 23rd Street in Havana were horses without saddles, bridals, or horseshoes—a pair of wild ponies like inflatable tin cans, fragile; civilian horses, not warriors, chewing the Cuban proletariat’s lack of grass. They say they would appear only at night, when the light is friendly and the town looks desolate, deserted. They are portable statues, improbable, almost spectral, like the equine nickname of the phantasm Fidel. Toy horses at biological scale. Weightless silhouettes that, with the first hurricane that passes close to Cuba, will be ripped from their sidewalks and disappear from our History without leaving too many hoof prints.