{"id":254569,"date":"2022-06-24T16:10:56","date_gmt":"2022-06-24T20:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=254569"},"modified":"2022-06-24T16:10:56","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T20:10:56","slug":"postscript-2-talk-with-a-young-man-who-left-and-returned-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba\/migration\/postscript-2-talk-with-a-young-man-who-left-and-returned-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Postscript #2: talk with a young man who left and returned (I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I promised at the end of my <\/span>previous Postscript <\/b><\/a>to \u201cLetter to a young man who is leaving,\u201d in this second one I meet again with one of the young people who commented on the <\/span>original Letter<\/b><\/a>. Thanks to his noble disposition to talk with me, and to the magic of WhatsApp, I share the first part of this dialogue with Maykel Galindo, with the added value of ten years that have gone by, and of a conversation resumed now in the tranquility of an early morning.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rafael Hern\u00e1ndez (RH). When did you leave Cuba? How old were you? What were you doing here? Why did you leave?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Maikel Galindo (MG): I left Cuba in 2002, I was nineteen years old and in the first year of my career at the Varona [Pedagogical Institute], in English. Leaving was practically an accident. I never thought of leaving, nor did I even have a well-formed political opinion. In high school and school, I was always a good student, and I was even a member the Communist Youth. I was, I think because of my mother, and because of my family\u2019s revolutionary record. My grandfather on my mother\u2019s side participated in the guerrilla, he took things to the Sierra for Fidel. And on my father\u2019s side, my grandmother, who is from Santiago, also fought for the Revolution. I grew up with stories of the Revolution. Despite having lived through some years as complex as the Special Period<\/a>, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever been formed with an opinion contrary to anything that had to do with the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

The accident was that I met two people with whom I shared the same lifestyle, and they opened my eyes. I\u2019m homosexual; and in Cuba in those years homosexuality was very complicated, there wasn\u2019t the openness that there is today, and much less the political or social will to advance towards more rights for LGTBI people.<\/span><\/p>\n

I left because I was invited to get to know another culture; because it was important for my career to visit Europe, for fifteen days, for Christmas.<\/span><\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t planned to go live abroad, but to visit Brussels, to discover, let\u2019s say, personal things. It was like a journey into myself, towards discovering and accepting my homosexuality. That was a more advanced society with respect to LGTBI issues than Cuba, and since I had not planned to stay, it was not difficult.<\/span><\/p>\n

What was difficult was to obtain the white card in Cuba, which at that time was necessary to leave; the huge queues at Immigration, the \u201cbureaucracy\u201d and the \u201crelease is not available yet.\u201d The exit process was very complicated and distressing. Every time I went to Immigration they treated me badly, to be honest, they were not friendly, as they are today. When I started coming later, as a Cuban resident abroad, after the 2011 reform carried out by Ra\u00fal Castro, I realized that there had been a change, because when entering the Immigration agents were much friendlier.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Maikel<\/a>
Maikel in 2002, when he left Cuba. Photo: courtesy of the interviewee.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

RH: Was it difficult for you to make the decision to leave? What was the most difficult part for you? How did you come to terms with the thought that you couldn\u2019t live here again?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

MG: The desire to live abroad, or to value not returning to Cuba, began with that mistreatment, to achieve something as simple as traveling for fifteen days on vacation and returning. To see homosexuals who lived peacefully, and it was a matter of time before it happened in Cuba. Because I experienced my sexuality in Havana with great sadness and difficulty. These people I met wanted to show me that, at some point in their lives, it had been like this; and then, when they assumed it, everything changed. It was really a journey into myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

When that process of leaving the country became so overwhelming for me, I began to think that perhaps I would not live in Cuba again. The Dean of my Faculty, to whom I went to ask for a fifteen-day leave to travel, told me no. I had to ask for \u201ca leave to take care of my grandfather.\u201d And I realized that I was fighting against I don\u2019t know who or that they were seeing me as an enemy of something, which I wasn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n

RH: Have you ever felt the loss of your life here, your friends, your city, your customs? What did you miss the most? How did you manage to overcome that nostalgia?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

MG: I began to feel the loss of my life in Cuba years later. When you\u2019re nineteen and you arrive in a place where everything is new, incredibly functional, and you leave a country that was so close to the memory of the Special Period, let\u2019s not be fooled: you hardly miss what you had, a noisy city, dysfunctional, chaotic, sexist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even less when you are offered a world full of new possibilities and experiences, which as a young person you want to the fullest, intensely. The nostalgia came later, when you already assume that you are in your new life, a new space, and you would like to do with the friends you left behind the things you are doing with your new friends; when you see your mother sitting down making you breakfast, taking you to school, those things that inevitably invade you; when you are visiting any European city and you realize that there\u2019s always a Bodeguita del Medio, that there is something that speaks of Cuba, an advertisement for Havana Club, these are things that little by little connect you with your city. That\u2019s what happens when you\u2019re studying, and all of a sudden in the Economic Doctrine class, <\/span>History Will Absolve Me<\/span><\/i> appears, with a cover and everything, because the professor, a Nicaraguan Sandinista, is doing something similar to an apologia of Cuba and the Revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

They are things, whatever it may be, that fill you with pride. I\u2019m not saying this to praise Cuba today, nor to put it before everything, but they make you think and connect with your past life. Then, what seemed dark, becomes the object of investigation. And you start to become more interested about your culture, where you come from, you start to want to be less the person you wanted to be and more the person you are, and the nostalgia increases. What I missed the most were those moments with my friends; Incredibly, the meals in the school in the countryside, the parties with them, the Malec\u00f3n, the guitar, those parties that we lived innocently, when we were young, and in my case, very young.<\/span><\/p>\n

RH: Living in the country where you were, did you feel that you were less prepared than other foreigners to adapt? Culturally?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

MG: When you\u2019re so young, adaptation comes naturally. My references in Cuba were few. At nineteen, what have you done? Junior and senior high school, military service: they are not life experiences that form you or contribute to your later life. Many of those memories become pretty over time. But everything I was experiencing then was so exciting, emotionally and for life, that I didn\u2019t feel any more or less prepared. What I was seeing was as new as it can be for a young Belgian of eighteen or nineteen when discovering Barcelona. Culturally speaking, many things were not familiar to me. For any poor young man like me, everything was culturally unknown.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was the same for other foreigners in my situation, young, poor, coming from a poor country.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I can say is that in college I did not feel any less prepared. Knowing that I had the support of a family and people in Belgium, many of the things I experienced happened naturally.<\/span><\/p>\n

RH: Do you think that most of the Cubans you met there share your same experience?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

MG: Definitely not. First, because I arrived very young; second, having had support to study there. These two elements completely changed the course of a normal immigrant who comes for economic reasons.<\/span><\/p>\n

I know a couple of Cubans who share the same perspective as mine regarding Cuba, the return, etc. Although I don\u2019t know many in Belgium either, for the reasons I say: I\u2019m an atypical immigrant, who didn\u2019t have to work to feed himself, or give up certain dreams, on the contrary. Despite never having finished anything, because I was constantly changing careers, I was always immersed in that world of a student, far from \u201ca normal life.\u201d It\u2019s difficult to meet today with people who arrived with my age and had that path, rather, they arrived a little older, and in other conditions. Of course they don\u2019t share my experience, much less my vision.<\/span><\/p>\n

RH: Do you think that your life abroad has contributed to changing your values? To deepen them?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

MG: My life abroad has definitely contributed to changing and deepening them; in a certain way, to bring out the best version of myself, that wouldn\u2019t have come out if I had grown up in Cuba or if I had never returned. Or if I had been born in Belgium and had nothing Cuban about me. My experience, having studied, having met incredible people, having acquired the training and values \u200b\u200binstilled by my parents, and also having studied in a society like the Cuban one.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll quickly tell you a story. In my first year as a regular student, in an English language class, I introduced myself saying that I was from Cuba, and at first hardly anyone wanted to talk to me. A few weeks later, Dafne, a girl who later became my friend, asks me: \u201cMaikel, are you the son of someone from the government in Cuba?\u201d I told her no. \u201cFrom someone rich in Miami?\u201d Neither, why? \u201cIt\u2019s not normal for a Cuban to be studying here, sitting with us, and you look overly educated and from a very good family.\u201d I found that dichotomy curious, like in Cuba, where you have to be one thing or the other, and I told her: \u201cI\u2019m a boy who grew up in a very bad neighborhood, very poor, and I am the result of what Cuba is, where studying and being educated is not given only to people of a certain social class, but to everyone.\u201d Over the years, I understood what it means in Cuba when they say \u201cfree school\u201d; as I also understood that in the Belgian university, when you are a simple person, you can also study and go far, without having to be wealthy, but it is a matter of will. If it had not been for that complement of formation in Europe and that formation base in Cuba, with my modest origin, I would not have become the person I am today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Postscript to \u201cLetter to a young man who is leaving\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n