My Friend Marquito Will Repatriate to Cuba

My Friend Marquito Will Repatriate to Cuba / Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez

Cubanet, Luis Cino Alvarez, Havana, 31 October 2016 — My friend Marquito
who has lived in Miami for fifteen years, has decided, as soon as he
retires, to return to Cuba to live.

When he told me his plans, on the next to last day of my stay in Miami,
after several whiskies and beers as we sat on the patio of a mutual
friend in Miami Springs, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I
thought it was a joke. Or pure drunkenness. But no. The man is serious.
He has it all worked out. And is even trying to convince some of his
friends to imitate him.

He said his American Dream isn't going like he dreamed: that he is
always financially burdened, that he can't make it with the costs and
the taxes, that he worked too much in jobs he didn't like and that were
below his professional abilities, which kills nostalgia, and he doesn't
want to end up in an asylum…

He explains that in Cuba, with the new circumstances created by the
restoration of relations with the United States, he will get much more
out of the 700-odd dollars he'll receive from his pension when he
retires at 65 (he's almost 60). He calculates that in Havana, at his
mother's house in El Vedado, he will be able to live much better that he
does today in Miami, where that money will barely pay the rent for
the studio, a bedroom with a bathroom and kitchen, where he has lived in
Hialeah since his divorce.

In vain I tried to convince him that this is nonsense, that "something,"
which for me continues to be "this," has not changed as much as he
thinks, that I can't imagine that after so many years he could readapt
and resign himself to living without freedom after having known it.

He says, "It doesn't matter, with money you can slip by, you're
indifferent. And when I'm really bored, when I need to oxygenate myself,
now I can come and go, get a ticket and spend a few days vacation in Miami…"

He says he has met several Cubans who have returned to the country and
haven't repented it. When I tell him it's really fucked to give the
dictatorship arguments to say that most of those who leave Cuba go for
economic reasons and not political ones, and that I am beginning to
understand Cuban-American politicians I disagree with, like Senator
Marco Rubio and the representative Carlos Curbelo, when they complain
that some Cubans are blatantly abusing the laws of the United States,
and especially the pockets of the American taxpayers, Marquito
interrupts me and tells me not to get all heavy with the "freaking
politics" and he asks me if I wouldn't be happy if we got together
"there," like we used to, and talk and listen to music from the '70s.
Now that he has reassembled his vinyl collection he's bring it to Cuba
and we'll listen to it with much better quality that when we used to
listen on those horrible Russian turntables.

I can already imagine the bitter and endless litany of lamentations and
complaints about "this" that Marquito would repeat in these meetings of
castaways. The same ones as fifteen years ago, before he left. When he
thought he was being suffocated and that the world as we knew it, would
crush him. Has he already forgotten that time?

Marquito joked and in the face of my dismay sang, closer to Charlie
Garcia Carlos Gardel, the one about "return, with a withered face …" and
"feeling that is a breath of life …" And then he got philosophical, and
said: "It's like closing a circle. Completing a cycle. That's what it's
about…"

I still do not believe he was serious. I prefer to think it was a joke.

About the Author: Luis Cino Alvarez (b. Havana, 1956).

Source: My Friend Marquito Will Repatriate to Cuba / Cubanet, Luis Cino
Alvarez – Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/my-friend-marquito-will-repatriate-to-cuba-cubanet-luis-cino-alvarez/