If I had the opportunity to travel to a foreign country for two weeks, I would love to go to Cuba. I’ve always felt attracted to that little island, its landscape, its people, their nature, but especially, their music. The first time I saw Cuba on television, I was 9 years old. The scene was filmed from a moving car on a rural road, and there was a whole 4-member family on a bike, smiling and waving hands to the camera. I think that was my first and most intense déjà vu experience ever. Somehow, I was strongly certain that I had been there, I knew that field, the trees along that road, its curves and, for some reason, I recognized that place as something already lived and crossed, and a joyful feeling impregnated my soul.
Many years have passed since that day, but the images and sounds from that land have kept reaching out to me as though they were tickling my memory. To discover ‘cuban son’ was a major event of my adolescence. A classmate had an old collection of antique records: Arsenio Rodríguez, Compay Segundo, Ismael Rivera... again the same feeling, the same familiarity, but this time even in a deeper way, it was like my pulse had always throbbed at that exact beat, but that I was hearing it for the very first time. Many movies came after that, and more colors and more news about that far corner of the world.
I have not been to Cuba yet, and I had an almost serious attempt to go when I was still in college, but the Atlantic waves sometimes swallow you in a merciless way, and leave you spinning inside the breakwater of some other shores. I’m not in a rush, I have the inner conviction someday I’ll look at the ocean from Varadero, I’ll walk the dark night streets of Old Habana, I’ll chew sugar cane in Esperanza and again I’ll ride an orange bicycle on that countryside road.
