Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989

13. Bitter Daiquiris: A Crystal Chronicle

................ 13 ................ Bitter Daiquiris: A Crystal Chronicle josé quiroga Translated by Elisabeth Enenbach One-Way Street All trips to Havana are unfinished. One looks for a photo or loses the memory of one. A memory that didn’t exist is erased, and another created that doesn’t appear in any pictures. One recovers some insignificant detail—a little bottle of shampoo, a glass—and that detail is labeled with some new amnesia. Upon contact with the air of another time—that air, which you bring with you—the object remains, but that which is illustrated by the object dissolves. For many years, one photo, many. Albums with patriotic monuments. Stamps. Havana was a whole mausoleum of patriots. Dates attached with pins to lives that were never led in its streets. A ranch in Viñales, the gesture of someone who looked at themselves in a mirror. Beyond these incidentals, nothing. Music records to remember those times. And on the cover of the records, again, the patriotic monuments: the column with the imperial eagle intact. Tidbits of exile. Little snacks with strawberry paste and cream cheese. Havana was always the time of an event never recovered, but more like invented . Another name for that time, another version of Proust. Or, as an ad for the Hard Rock Café in New York says, now it’s time to remember what you never lived. One always travels to Havana with the need—almost the desire—to try to make the trip a habit. One must forget the city, and that’s why one must travel. bitter daiquiris 271 But the way there and the way back are more like two di√erent kinds of leaving, not two di√erent kinds of returning. Even when one returns, one is always leaving. The story of a trip to Havana should be written in reverse: the chronicle of a trip toward forgetting. Habaneros, at the end of the day, erase the city constantly, every day. Aspiring to this kind of forgetfulness turns out to be the most genuine way of participating in that which is Cuban. I don’t know if the word is forget, exactly, but it would be a synonym. In Havana, poems speak of other things, paintings show other realities. One looks for life behind the city’s back or within it, deep within it. Too much so. Almost hidden: enclosures with cold, cold air-conditioning, well-presented canapés taken to a gathering where we also eat mangoes with our hands. That is also very Cuban: airconditioning and mangoes. This account is written with the tranquility lent by the taxonomy of my person so often repeated in Havana. I am a being who was born in that place, who left that place in this or that moment. Who lived in that country or the other. Who has or doesn’t have, has lost or regained, or never had, the accent he should have had, never had, would have wanted to have. That whole set of parameters is a star placed on a piece of graph paper. The graph paper is enormous, and it spreads out, and it is Cuba. And somewhere on that graph paper, I don’t care where, my point can be found. Going to Havana is like finding the paper, finding the point on the piece of paper, finding the repose that this amnesia can also invoke. The Airport But taxonomy begins from without, and much earlier. The graph paper was already in place—what’s more, imposed—before leaving. The border is visible or invisible, according to how one chooses the form of departure (remember that there is no possible arrival—one is always leaving). A concrete signifier (an airport) or an abstract representation (a line in the ocean). Both have the same ambiguous e√ect: the dispossession of the citizen on the one hand, and on the other his or her exact positioning. Strictly speaking, there is not one border, nor two, but, rather, many. The taxonomic delirium consumes us. So much uprooting, and still the need we all feel to locate ourselves in space. In the airport, habitual travelers can be distinguished from the curious and the nostalgic. Those, in turn, are di√erent from those who live on the island but travel to see their families and return. Or from those who live elsewhere but have family in Cuba. 272 jos...