I had another of those dislocating moments that I am prone to have every several months. Those moments when I detach from what is going on and get caught in a loop of self awareness as the world continues to spin around me. I was born in Cuba at the dawning of 1960, at that moment when the world was holding its breath, or more likely celebrating, the fact that Batista, that despotic tin pot dictator had been deposed in what seemed like a refreshingly non aligned grass roots uprising by idealistic young bearded men, not swayed by the trappings of power. Oh, boy.
Most of my family left before the end of the sixties, our own nuclear family via el puente aereo a set of weekly flights from La Habana to Miami via beautiful Pan Am jets. Some stayed behind, amongst them my uncle Jorge whose name I bear as well as I has named by my father after his two beloved brothers, Jorge and Carlos. I am not sure but my father always said he was a true believer and hence stayed behind.
My father has been dead for forty two years in 2023 - I have outlived him so far by fifteen years. I didn't really think too much about Cuba for years but a few years ago, a distant cousin, two generations removed, reached out on social media and reconnected me with my uncle Jorge, the youngest and only surviving brother. I am now in sporadic contact with him and my first cousin in Cuba. I send them money as the vagaries of US politics allow; I have an intimate window into their daily lives and their unimaginable privations to us here in our first world cocoon. For example, my uncle had to have a small skin cancer excised. To get this accomplished my cousin had to resort to the black market to procure antiseptics, a scalpel, stitches, anesthetic and gauze as the hospital had none of these items available.
I am hyper aware of the proportion between the short time we are alive and the vast eternity that we will be dead for so I tend to overdo it when it comes to being out and about and enjoying ourselves. Tonight for example, we started at a pop-up bar dressed to mimic Elvis' jungle room, moved on to the oyster bar at the oldest restaurant in Boston and oldest restaurant in continuous operation in the US, the Union Oyster House and ended up in a very fashionable Cuban restaurant called Mariel after the town from where the last mass exodus from Cuba launched.
The restaurant is beautiful and has this old Havana esthetic: murals, distressed overpainted walls, faux antique tiles, etc. The food was astounding, clever tropes on traditional dishes and flavors, astonishing cocktails including a perfect Hemingway daiquiri and the best mojito I've had in my life. And then, smack in the middle what was a fabulous evening in the company of my lovely wife and our best friends, family really, it all came down on me like a ton of bricks
This place is worse than a farce, it is fake nostalgia for the idea of an exotic and romantic post revolution run down Havana/Cuba. What seems a colorful, trendy backdrop to the young, first world well to do diners, is an unintentional mocking of the severe privations suffered by the Cuban population. After more than sixty years of corrupt and inept mismanagement the country is a basket case buoyed only by the flow of hard currency - when possible - from the Cubans of the diaspora.
This all fell on my head like the proverbial ton of bricks as it does occasionally. The delta between my privileged, comfortable and sometimes frivolous life and the hard scrabble existence of my family that remains in Cuba is so vast as to be hard to fathom. I try to trick myself and make believe that they don't have the same but converse experience but that is just not true.
I do what I can, economically, emotionally etc. It's just not enough, and won't ever be.