I Was Never the First Lady by Wendy Guerra

Author:Wendy Guerra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperVia
Published: 2021-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

There wasn’t enough material to paint and study, and the buildings weren’t finished yet. The architects Porro, Garatti, and Gottardi, one Cuban and the others Italian, roamed the school until late at night.

Sometimes Celia called, asking about me; I know this because some professors told me, but never the principal, a tyrant who imposed military discipline: painters marching to the dining room, dancers marching to the bathroom. Madness.

In the first months a collective call was made to join the mobilization to harvest coffee in the eastern zone. On December 22nd, in the Plaza de la Revolución, we asked Fidel: “Tell us what else we can do. We will always do our duty.” And Fidel answered: “Harvest coffee”—and we took off for the mountains.

I actually wanted to be in Havana. But I couldn’t—and I didn’t want to—miss this new adventure. In any case, no one was staying behind at the school. I would have preferred to read and paint, but we’d asked Fidel and he’d given his answer.

Apparently this was part of the economic struggle being waged as a result of the Second Declaration of Havana. I don’t know, at the time nobody was asking too many questions; we put everything away where we could and went off to the hills.

My luggage was a cardboard box. We went on a train, different schools mixed together, boys and girls together, but I don’t remember where my sister was at the time. The journey seemed to never end, but we finally arrived in Guantánamo, near the base where I was born. I remembered my mother, cried a few tears, and made a sketch of her face in my notebook. I didn’t want to forget it. I knew our family was now the whole world, but my mother’s face was my mother’s face, and that was no game. For me, this was indeed a journey in reverse.

My God, we were so hungry! I missed the scholarship-funded meals the high-life chef used to cook, substituting spices with whatever he had on hand. We used to call those meals “Whatever’s not gone with the wind.” I missed my mattress, the school cafeteria, the fine cutlery with which we had learned how to eat in a refined way, the people who returned to visit after they’d left in the ’60s. We were living in their mansions, located around the club, full of encyclopedias, stylish furniture, fine ornaments—we had destroyed it all. We hadn’t known what to do with what we found in the drawers or on the shelves of those houses; we couldn’t even imagine what or how half those implements were used.

We waited all morning at the park in Guantánamo, and in the end, all fourteen visual arts students were sent to Santo Domingo de Sagua. We were exhausted by the time we arrived. It was so muddy they had to tie the truck to tree trunks with a steel cable. I was terrified of the precipice, the emptiness. “The abyss calls the abyss.”

Finally, we came to a large tent with a zinc roof near the Toa River; it had a coffee-drying room.

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