68: Cheap biochemistry

I remember my father’s most endearing and sad act was in 1989, when he was seventy. I told him I was going to study biochemistry at the University of Havana, and one afternoon he appeared with a used book he “had bought on some corner.” (Later it turned out he had stolen it for me from the National Library, with the statue of José Martí in its lobby that so resembled a Modigliani.) It was a pirated English edition of a book called Biochemistry from the beginning of the ‘60s: an obsolete text almost as old as the Revolution. Poor papá. I accepted the gift more from mercy than from love. But time passed. I studied at the University of Havana and graduated with honors in Biochemistry in 1994. I worked as a molecular biologist in an elite center of the Council of State until 1999, when the Security (precisely) of the State took away my ability to exercise my profession within the country.

My father died a year later, of cancer and sadness. I became a writer. And what a writer: he who is going to write Cuba’s obituary in posthumous pixtures, where photos are confused with texts, and texts with photos. When I left, I couldn’t even say goodbye to many people who turned their backs on me, and I tossed in the trash all my super-up-to-date books on Molecular Biology, Immunology, Biophysics, and other molecular nonsense I still remember perfectly. However, still today, halfway between the killer island and an exile that already forgot me, I still keep that old behemoth that my dad “bought me.” It was the world’s most profitable theft, because it is this book that has taught me the most in the world. And I still haven’t read it.