6: What if God was one of us?

If God had a name in Havana, it would be Gilma Madera. She was the woman who gave birth to His Marble Son with her own hands. She was the mother and midwife of the Christ of Havana Bay, her sixty-foot, three-hundred-and-fifty–ton baby who looks toward Havana’s cathedral. The Catholic hierarchy was uneasy inaugurating it; with sensual lips and noble, macho forearms, it was a Christ too carnal. His mane may have anticipated Lennon’s, but he lacked the Beatle’s psychedelic glasses, and perhaps because of this he was soon blind.

One week after his unveiling on Christmas Day 1958, the triumph of the Castro Revolution left the statue within a military base where Ernesto Ché Guevara executed countless Cubans, holding trials after their executions and flushing out their blood for use in the people’s hospitals, now free.

If God had a face in Havana, it would be that of Madera’s marble Christ, a statue the same age as communism in Cuba, now surrounded by an area for tourists, whose involuntary offerings are empty beer cans and full condoms. Despite all that, the statue still seems to ask us a question, just one, with the merciful gaze of a stranger who travels with us in the same bus, trying to make his way home, trapped in a history without histology. A question, of course, unpronounceable, like everything truly human.