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Exile and Freedom

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Read Original in Spanish  Hypermedia Magazine      "The truth will set you free." 1 —I told my neighbor—. The immigration officer said it to me after the interrogation, and it stuck with me. Those were his words as he handed me a parole for myself and another for my son. I didn't even know it was a biblical reference. It was September 2016, and we were fleeing from Canada. Just three weeks earlier, I had finished three years of chemotherapy, with little supervision. In Quebec, public health is neither public nor healthy, and I was an aspiring immigrant with no right to get sick. Escape flights to Cuba kept me alive: I would get my pills, receive my IVs, my baby's pediatrician would see him, and then back again to the struggle for a better future in that "first world" we must reach at all costs, for our children. We still tell ourselves that today, far from them. I wasn't afraid because, although I feared for my life, I knew I was breathing due to a powe...
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The Angel

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A dream in Cuba, before my twentieth birthday      A great Cuban-American friend, her Cuban husband, and I were in some huge, damp, labyrinth-like sewers. We didn't know how we had ended up there and were desperately trying to find our way back to our city, Havana. If we had been French, we would have been in the sewers of Paris. The black, pestilent water that ran below our knees was full of greased and dead fetuses. Terrified, we tried to escape. Everything was black, musty, and damp. There was no light, except a strange stale brightness that had no visible origin. The path narrowed to the point where we could no longer continue with our heads above water. I jumped in to swim to the other side and access a wider space inside the sewer. Swimming underwater was indescribable. As I emerged on the other side, I had a panic attack. I ran and ran, desperate not to find my friends. The sewer ended and turned into a clean but dead-end corridor. Suddenly, it looked like the base...
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El Ángel

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Un sueño en Cuba, antes de cumplir veinte años         Una gran amiga cubanoamericana, su esposo cubano y yo estábamos en unas alcantarillas húmedas y enormes, con forma de laberinto. No sabíamos cómo habíamos acabado allí y tratábamos desesperadamente de encontrar la salida para regresar a nuestra ciudad, La Habana. Si hubiéramos sido franceses, habríamos estado en las alcantarillas de París. El agua pestilente y negra que corría por debajo de nuestras rodillas estaba llena de fetos engrasados. Aterrorizados, intentábamos escapar. Todo era negro, mohoso y húmedo. No había luz, excepto una extraña claridad rancia sin origen visible.        El camino se fue angostando hasta el punto en que ya no podíamos continuar con la cabeza fuera del agua. Me lancé para nadar hacia el otro lado y acceder a un espacio más amplio dentro de la cloaca. Nadar por debajo del agua fue indescriptible, asqueroso y sangriento. Al salir al otro lado, tuve un ataque d...
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