This summer, as all previous ones, is really when children start leaving. They have been packing their bags for days. They put in them the human and the divine: bizarre toys and chocolate breakfast, the last book he received, the umbrella of flowers – because surely it rains – the chain of gold, the irrevocable sleeping pillow …
They say goodbye to everyone, but without nostalgia. It is the only trip that is not into nothingness. They grab their luggage with an enviable resolution. They make them roll like Lamborghinis on polished slabs in the living room. They go and down the stairs while the mother bites her nails. Soon they ask for a juice and some crackers.
When it’s time the father fits their caps, and the mother looks at the hair buckles. They cannot avoid the “behave yourself, listen to your …”. A watered flight attendant receives with too much affectation, in short, fatuous and false. But they are big enough and know what they do. Nothing will happen: they are the travelling children, who did not fear planes and know how to go to the bathroom alone, and fast the seat belt back .
The planes are their wings, the scope of freedom. Every summer become another time to take a route that leads to all the excesses that they yearn daily: playing on the street, dirty feet, eat with much fat, sunburned, watch TV for hours, arming gangs, give any tantrum, sleep in the big bed, go to the deep. The perfect state of happiness.
These kids come looking for adrenaline and affection beyond doubt. A spoiling affection, absolute, who wants to remedy, in just one month, the vacuum: grandparents, uncles and cousins, every year, repeat the cycle. They receive their boys, the sons of their absent children, the children of his brothers gone, the swallows that many families in Cuba welcome with joy special because they are the ties, the certainty that they are still being a family.
Within weeks the travelling children indomitable ratify this link is deeply rooted in what we Cubans are. With their few years, this is what they do for their country.
Children come from all over. In Cuba they are completed. They will make friends all colors, compare what they learned in school, share mock modes, here and there, the teacher, will end exchanging accents and voices.
In a few years the Cuban airports also increasingly see off these travelling children after uncles and cousins and even grandparents settled in other distant countries. The new Cuban immigration regulations already allowed it. They will go to spend a month of conquest and learn that the world is round, and that the family is a universe.
Author
Milena Recio
