Revolution Sunday by Wendy Guerra

Author:Wendy Guerra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2018-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

I’ve been sitting on this marble bench for more than three hours. This feels like a mausoleum. How can our highest leaders contemplate the political panorama from here? This height is uncomfortable. You have to be careful not to fall from the vertigo, and to hold yourself up is painful.

Gerónimo was authorized to meet with the history archive’s new director. He’s waited months for this meeting; he’s come to visit month after month but they’ve refused to see him. Finally, they let him in the doors today.

How long will this take? Will they let him look through the archive? Do documents about that man exist? Did that man exist?

From the time I was little, I’ve walked, danced, paraded through, in cars and with my gaze, the Plaza of the Revolution. But it looks different today, because winter in Havana softens the character of the drama we interpret. Everything is clear. Today, I find a kind of cynical lyricism in these symbols. The guards watch me from a distance as a copy of yesterday’s newspaper and a yellow butterfly float by. This silence is so heavy that I can see the traces of the parades on the ground. I see our entire lives being swept away, dragged along, tossed into a rolling trash can.

Our existence has been one grand parade that, in the end, transforms into a frenetic conga line. Just as it seems we’re going to shatter, to rebel against the effrontery, against the lies projected on the buildings around this plaza, we end up dancing, drunk on politics and dazzled by fear.

First there’s the parade, then the party—bread and circus—beer and live music, and then later, bending bodies under the stream of water, letting those cold needles prick, pierce, and pin your back to the wall.

Moonshine, doubt, and rum’s devilish spirit come to interrogate you. Memories, perpetual flight, and the fear of escaping, or not, of not knowing what’s right—these bring you to a standstill. The water purifies your tears and a whimper swallows your guilt at being both spectator and participant in this circus. The speech and the conga line go down the drain. You fall, fall, fall knowing one day you won’t be able to get up and away from the danger. You know your parents couldn’t either because it was too late to cure the sickness we all suffer.

We live one on top of the other, and this overcrowding, this need for our neighbors in order to survive is both contagious and debilitating; we end up fighting; we divide until we fall into a deep loneliness, surrounded by witnesses.

I’m sitting on the bench, looking out at the panorama before me, an empty Plaza of the Revolution. José Martí’s gaze is aimed somewhere else, maybe out to sea—it rises above the disaster, beyond this. I feel very small here, beneath the grayness and its shadows, waiting for them to let Gerónimo have a handful of crumbs of our historic memory.

Gerónimo finally crosses the esplanade in the company of a military officer.

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