HAVANA, Cuba.- I have spent the entire day grumbling, berating those who forced me to stand in a huge and merciless line. I cursed the sun that burned me, and the drizzle that would come later. I cursed the queue, I cursed the tumult, and also the man who pointed out, and unambiguously, his sharpened knife after an argument with another man who defended his position in the queue.
I feared the heat that the argument was gaining and those who were about to fight each other with sharp knives for a simple “coincidence”; Both coleros defended the same position in the line, both argued, with endless coinciding “evidence”, the same position in the line to buy the potatoes.
And I cringed, I curled up into a ball while all this was happening, while the anger seemed to take on aspects of a global conflagration. I got scared and remembered one of my grandmother’s many sentences again. “The potato helps”; That’s what my grandmother Ángela said while she stripped the tuber of all its peel, and while she removed the peel, Grandma enrolled in a story about some of the great accompaniments that the potato could make.
And his list, the one that grew with each effort, always began with the meat that was accompanied by the potato. Meat and potatoes could be considered our “national dream”, meat and potatoes was, in my grandmother’s speech, one of our greatest chimeras, the best-crafted utopia.
The potato moves everything
The potato, at least in Cuba, moves everything. In Cuba the potato is a spring, it is that spring that stretches and stretches and that when released reaches incredible distances with even more incredible speeds. In Cuba the potato moves everything, and I even believe that there is no better reason to gather the masses in Cuba than a line to buy potatoes. A queue to buy potatoes could be the point, both implicit and explicit, to start an argument, a rebellion.
A line to buy potatoes in Cuba could be explained based on the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, and let the reader tell me, if they know the Cuban line, if everything I say is not true, and let someone come and deny me. The Cuban cola brings misfortune, the Cuban cola endangers the lives of innocent people, even, as a friend said, people who are “young and have not yet loved.”
A queue to buy potatoes is a tragic event. Queues in Cuba bring misfortunes, and those of us who have been waiting in lines in Cuba for sixty years know this very well. The queue arouses the pity that the helpless old man provokes in us who clings to that bag he is holding in the hope that something good will fall inside him to put on the stove later, but we are almost never able to offer him our place in the queue.
The queue arouses a terror that could even wake up Aeschylus, and even more so if a queue makes threats with his knife, as happened; and I put an end to my queue, and I returned home, without potatoes, and I began to write these lines full of longing; and with the same emphasis as that Raquel Revuelta who screamed, crying: “Mom, give me a gardenia!”, I said: “mom, give me a potato”…
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2024-04-01 21:59:44
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