Resilience

By Ileana Fernández

It is a story based on totally real facts. It tells how life can change us in a second, sometimes, by being absorbed in our thoughts or everyday life.
This happened to the protagonist of this novel testimony and led her to be in prison for years, however, this experience would serve to discover a potential that she did not know she had.
All this facts, happened in Cuba.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ileana Fernández
• Release date: May 27, 2019

Book preview

PREFACE

The story told in Resilience is totally real. Although in principle the author's interest was to denounce the serious violations that occurred during her criminal proceedings, while writing, she realized that many other things that have existential value occurred. She discovered that, despite being one of the most painful moments of her life, they also served to grow and improve as a human being.

The author

© 2019

ISBN: 978-0-359-69107-4 

Ileana Fernández

Dámaso

After I reading the note I crumpled it and threw it in the trash with anger but relieved. I hardly knew the sender. We had only spoken twice in life and adding all minutes of conversation, it didn’t reach fifty. However, these few minutes radically changed my life forever.

Did he deserve my forgiveness?

It had all started three years ago when I had down the stairs of my house cheerfully, but muttering:

Oh, my God! How much insistent is this guy asking to talk to me about!

It was the first time I saw him as electricity collector in my area, but I had been his second grade teacher. His name was Dámaso and remember this reassured me. Immediately he recognized me:

I didn’t know that you were the one who lived here! I imagined other people, but anyway what I come to propose may suit you. Can we talk privately?

I had just gone down the three floors to prevent him from going up to my house. I used to receive the strangers at the front door to prevent visits from being extended and interrupting my routine and my chores, but this time I felt shame to refuse him and I invited him to go up.

Upon entering the living room of my house, Dámaso made a gesture of pleasure and, like almost everyone who visited me, praised it. It was a cozy space, though much smaller than it seemed. It was built on the top floor of a tall three-story building. Two of the walls were completely transparent glass that pointed to a terrace in the shape of an L.

The view through the wall of glass literally encompassed the entire center of the city towards the four cardinal points and this had producing the magical effect of sitting on top of Havana. This image was repeating in a large mirror that hung in front of the glass multiplying the one already extensive urban landscape.

It was a quiet place in the midst of the most brutal bustle. So many years of watching my neighborhood from that height at all hours, it had created a peculiar harmony that dictated the approximate moment of the day. For example, I knew that when the newsboy was turning the corner, it was about six fifty in the morning, and without looking at the clock I used to wake up Malva to prepare her for school. That same vendor invariably had crossing in front of the warehouse with a man in military uniform, the same who I used to saw returning, near dusk lurching by drunk.

I knew many secrets of the people in the neighborhood, it means, I knew which husband had not gone to sleep at home, who one asked for things borrowed from other neighbors, where the guy that the police were chasing was hiding. This strategic position had taught me to be very discreet because otherwise it would have brought me serious problems because they were situations that could only be seen from my location.

Dámaso's proposal consisted to change my electricity meter clock for another one that would not take registration the consumption of 220v. The cost of the change was for the sum of fifty dollars, equivalent to one thousand two hundred and fifty Cuban pesos. But I said him no, because a sudden low in my electric bill made would send me an inspector and the fine would be bigger than what I could to save.

This response of mine gave rise to another conversation about the difficulty in solving the most basic material deficiencies and the overwhelming number of Cuban laws and measures that are only meant to suppress individual inventiveness, financial autonomy and instill the criterion that everyone who accesses to alternative economic was delinquent or lacks moral values. This, in a country where almost everything was forbidden: satellite dishes, computers and even DVD players. This was another reason why my privacy was so valuable. I was sociable and attentive, but I didn’t like receiving visits of strangers’ people because I had all those illegal equipment in my house.

I had to protect me of the president of CDR who visited me once time a year in search of the quotation and, in the face of my refusal to pay, always said the same thing: I'm going to pay it for you, but if you can, please, give me back the money. Any day you have a problem and you cannot have committee support.

I won’t have troubles, Mario. I do not do anything wrong or illegal. I used to answer with the quiet rejoicing of those who have nothing to hide, because although he had a satellite dish, computer or e-mail account, he never used them for profit. Yes, because in Cuba, one does not earn money, in Cuba one profit.

Mario used to pay my fee of his pocket because he sold in smuggled goods cleaning products which were stolen of a nearby factory. These products were destined for the national commercial of foreign currency and their prices were high. I was one of the few housewives who bought their disinfectants or branded dishwashers. He wanted no to lose a client.

The eagerness to collect the fee of all the neighbors, even at the expense of their own pockets was due to the interest of maintaining a façade and pretending the validity of an organization, long time ago dynamic and active, but now discredited and agonizing.

And about those things I talked to Dámaso who had become a young man not very tall, but with a very nice face. As a child he was calm and shy, now he seemed to be a decent boy, but very talkative.

It was a hot afternoon in June 2009 and the cool air conditioned of the room had dried the sweat on the thick Carmelite uniform. We talked a bit more about my daughter, who had studied at the same school, took a lemonade more and we said us goodbye.

My secret guide

The year 2009 was an intense in issues to relevant international events, such as take of possession of the first black president in the United States or the surprise death of the King of Pop.

These topics had always interested me and, now, thanks to a satellite dish receptor. Sometimes I feel very sad thinking that my life would long no enough for see all I wanted see.

At national level, the Concert for Peace was expected in which I would see Juanes and Miguel Bosé in person and I expecting it very anxiously.

It was the first opening of its kind to be held after Pope John Paul II ha pronounced his famous phrase: Let Cuba open up to the world and the world open up to Cuba, ten years before.

In the personal I was enjoying full happiness for last two years. That one which it feels when everything around you caresses your five senses.

This summit of satisfaction had been completed the day I met my secret friend. He was a very famous writer, journalist and presenter of a program which it was broadcast live every night by a Hispanic television station in Miami. His accurate, enlightening and convincing words stimulated my intellect and the desire to know more.

So, one night in 2008 I felt a reckless and irrepressible impulse and wrote a story about a hurricane that had hit Cuba and I sent it to him by email.

My initial intention had been to tell him a personal anecdote. I liked to imagine that my story would go beyond the borders. Only that. Something simple, but that for who living in a country without Internet and where everything was censored was an extraordinary fact.

I did it, but immediately I regretted it because I was risking the easiest and safest way to communicate all the time with my daughter who didn’t live in Cuba.

I had been very stupid and irresponsible from my part because email accounts were only assigned to health professionals for research purposes and were supervised by the Ministry of Public Health.

What happened that many doctors didn’t have a computer in their homes and they rented the accounts in exchange for ten dollars a month (equivalent to 250.00 Cuban pesos), and thus, they got an extra economic benefit. Who ones had relatives abroad needed them and paid them without objection.

My imprudence was more critical considering that I having a parabolic antenna I could be punished even with imprisonment because, according to the authorities, it had contributing to spread enemy propaganda.

That night I fell asleep with that one feeling of regret that we do not know to specify what produces it, something like a nauseating charge of conscience.

The next day I woke up before the sun came up. My idea was to tell my daughter in time the nonsense I had committed and warn her not to worry if I stopped writing to her.

When I opened the mail all my apprehension disappeared suddenly and was replaced by a nervous euphoria: it was fantastic! I had received a response from the writer hand: You're great, why do not you come to the studio? Of course it was impossible for me to go, but the mere fact of knowing that I could have been a special guest of his program satisfied my ego healthily, gave me strength, security and stimulated my self-esteem in great measure.

Since then my life took a 180 ° turn, because, although I was not being unhappy at all, to establish this friendship made me see that destiny can bring one very gratifying and unsuspected surprises. It was the peak of happiness.

It was logical that I felt honored with those concise but sagacious answers every day and that the corner of the room where the computer was where I wrote and where I saw him every night live, had coming to life and became the most important place of my house. How I say of my house!? Of my life!

He was the window through which I could and used to transgress the monolithic information of Cuban television and into the world of diversity and immediacy.

He became in my political, ethical and social guide, occupying a prominent place in my sentimental and emotional