It could have been any given morning in a primary school in Placetas, Villa Clara, in the late 1970s. Because yours was the last classroom in the hall, you can peek from the back windows into the vast domain of the schoolyard. Right at the back, where a tall concrete fence surrounds the field, there is a white bust of José Martí and a nickel-plated pole where everyday the flag is hoisted, signaling the beginning of a school day. From the windows on the side, you can see the typical greenery, the pointy leaves of a mango tree, and tall avocado, or tamarind, or guanábana trees that grow in that part of the Caribbean, in that big piece of land that, you are told, was once called the most beautiful island in the world. And it’s there, in the middle of paradise, you hunch forward in your silla de paleta, attempting to draw a perfect acorn.
You have never seen, touched, or tasted one. But they’re found in Europe, and pigs eat them, you are told. For a child in Soviet Cuba, that is enough to dream about a foreign land. After all, it is not that difficult to draw them, just a slightly elongated oval shape, with a semicircle on top. The surface details and the right shade of brown depend upon recalling pictures of them you had once seen, maybe in that rare book Las maravillas de la naturaleza. It is a beautiful hardcover that you thumb through once or twice at a friend’s house, marveling at the full-colored pages, with photographs of all the places in the world you have never been. There are mountains and jungles, but also meeker images of the European countryside. In them everything seems perfect, like an acorn.
But for a child in Central Cuba, drawing a fruit unknown is no easy task. You have drawn in Artes Plásticas before, so you know you can draw. You have tasted large yellow mangoes, fragrant guavas, caimitos, oranges and tangerines—for some reason, though, your teachers never want drawings of tropical fruits.
More than thirty years later, after living in Europe for over a decade, you will walk on a street from Vienna’s 8th district and notice, orphaned on the side walk, a single acorn. Probably just fallen from the nearby tree, you think, collecting the peculiar fruit and realizing that it is both known and unfamiliar—after all these years, you aren’t yet familiar with Europe’s natural wonders, or with the mundane references to the continent’s nature. This acorn, for example, will end up in your pocket. Later, you will post a picture of it on your Facebook page, with a short reflection on your childish inability to assess the meaning of a faraway land.
II.
During childhood and adolescence, you will associate Europe with apples and pears. They will illustrate the towers of cans at your local tienda, arranged to attract the attention of potential buyers. Cans of pears and apples in chunks, conserved in syrupy water. They come from Bulgaria, with the distinguishable stamp of BulgarConserv, and feature large images of greenish pears on the label. From time to time you will convince your grandma to buy one of them, which she will reluctantly purchase because they are not Libbys cans, the ones she used to buy before 1959. Once alone with your open can, you notice that despite the familiar shape on the front of the label, the pear halves inside are white or yellowy, soft and peeled. You, a child of nine, will assume they appear as such in nature, hanging from an also unknown pear-tree. Apple chunks also come peeled, in what you deem a perfect sample of the Old Continent. But you wonder, in their revered, but tragic lives, did Martin Luther and Joan of Arc—the heroes and heroines of your 6th-grade medieval history lessons—prefer pears to apples, or vice versa?
You still eat them, carefully placed in a china bowl that seems to have survived many centuries. Now that you are old enough to handle it, your Grandma allows you to use it, as well as many other items locked up in the glass cupboard at her house. And you have chosen some particular ones, which remind you of those decorations in your history book with gothic letters and knights and dragons, like the cup in which every morning Grandma pours you café con leche. But those are for breakfast, since your household still prides itself in keeping some traditional norms. Canned apples can only be a dessert, pieces of fruit to be eaten by you and your grumpy old Uncle Roberto. He is your grandmother’s only remaining brother, lives a few blocks away, and comes everyday for lunch, dinner and the occasional dessert. He moans about socialism and the lack of services and products, and encompasses all his hatred about current tastes and aromas in just one word: synthetic. Everything that is bad is synthetic, he says, like the chunks of apples and pears you are scooping from a can from Bulgaria. “Apples” he groans, “apples were the ones you had before.” And before is a reference that predates you, almost as Medieval History predates us. Before, for Uncle Roberto and increasingly for everybody, can only mean prior to 1959.
In secondary school you heard tales about the future and the possibility of studying abroad in an European socialist country, where you could become a physicists or an atomic engineer. Everybody appears to dream about travelling. Yet, nobody knows that in your Caribbean paradise travelling abroad, outside the Iron Curtain nations, is forbidden—those who do travel, embark on a journey without return. And you still fantasize about apples, more so after watching a recent re-run of a classic Soviet TV series where children venture into a neighbor’s garden to steal “spicy” apples. You cannot understand such diversity—can apples taste like Cuban ají picante? The possibility of being able to identify spice apple trees adds more fuel to the imagination. After all, as your cousin Camilo, who is halfway through his studies in faraway Kirgizia had told you that summer, There are places in the world where apple trees grow in the streets, by the sidewalk. To reach the fruits, all you have to do is extend your arm.
One day your father comes back from a medical appointment in Havana and leaves a plastic bag in one of the fridge drawers, just for you. Inside there are apples, green-yellowy fruits he has bought somewhere in the capital. You eat some, and share the others with your brother. He appears uninterested, though, so you finish the rest of the bag. In your mind, during that entire weekend, you are registering all the details of the experience, the fruit texture, the exact taste of the peel, if it can be compared to anything you have tasted before. You focus on the smell, the colors because you want to narrate the experience to your fellow students at school, or at least to the small group of friends who would care, those who are also dreaming about studying abroad.
When high school is over and you land in Havana, the quest to find that magical place where apples are sold begins. But it is September 1989, and the only fruits you find are those dipped in caramel, which people eat like a lollipop. You have seen the large trays of shiny red apples in what was once the opulent Ten Cent store, on Galiano. But they taste differently from the ones your father brought you years ago from one of his last trips to Havana, before that terrible summer when—no matter how much you wished it—he could not survive his fourth or fifth heart attack.
A year later, in 1990, the quest for exotic fruits will come to an end when by chance you enter a Mercadito, those stores in Havana that will disappear in the next coming months, along with the last apples for sale in Cuba. For now, however, the apples are still there. You buy a few and save one for your Bulgarian classmate, Svetla, who has politely answered all your questions about her country, about which you know so little. She takes a bite and thanks you, assuring you with passion that it is a Bulgarian apple. You wonder then if just one bite would be enough to identify a Cuban mango or a juicy guava from the very center of the island.
Fast forward a decade and you will find yourself in Maindy, Cardiff, Wales, staring at a bag of pears in a Tesco supermarket. You have eaten so many apples that year that you feel it is time to experience other local fruits. Unlike other compatriots of the diaspora, who have turned to the internet to lament the impossibility of replicating island flavors in another foreign land, you do not feel nostalgic—instead, you feel lost, without proper guidance. Like this very time at the Tesco stand, where you hesitate to take home that bag of unfamiliar large green pears, because they look so different from the ones in your memory: those white chunks floating in a syrupy liquid, served in the antique china bowl belonging to your grandmother.
III.
In 1992 comes the most special phase of the Special Period, and the fight for survival turns everything else unimportant. Forget acorns, apples and pears. Who can think about them when even the most ordinary Cuban fruits and vegetables are difficult to find or nowhere to be seen? Emaciated as you look, exhausted from listening time and time again to the national motto about resistir (to resist), you turn to the movies, now that the Cuban Cinematheque is dusting off its so-far wonderful collection of cinema classics. Cycle after cycle you and a small group of stoic friends join a kind of cult. There are no gods to worship, unless they are called Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, but attendance is almost compulsory. Every evening after eating the meager portion of food served in the students’ residence, your group of devotees heads for the Cinema La Rampa. At La Rampa, Europe becomes a multifarious construct, aided by reels and reels of footage representing past and current landscapes, battles, and everyday life.
In the old movies Europe becomes a signifier of abundance, or maybe you believe that because of your current state of scarcity. If you reminisce about your recent past, you do so only to wonder what Cuban schoolchildren are drawing at that very moment, or if they would marvel before the perfection of an acorn. But you realize that in 1992 there are not enough pens, or paintbrushes, or watercolors, or blank paper, for that matter. There are no acorns, and not much of anything else.
By the end of that decade most of your friends and fellow students would be scattered all over the world. And you will receive postcards and heartfelt letters with endless descriptions of known and unknown corners of the continent, from the cold Scandinavian lakes to the warmer islands of the Mediterranean. Your idea of Europe will expand increasingly by the inclusion of places never shown in films at Cinema La Rampa, such as Holstebro in Denmark, or Mons in Belgium.
You realize that being cosmopolitan has a new meaning in that context: it has more to do with making connections than with passively analyzing whatever was coming, and of course it entails an acknowledgement of world diversity beyond politics. If in the 1970s and 1980s priority had been given to the Eastern Block, its media and imports in order to make a safe bubble to protect you against the evils of capitalism, now the bubble has been pierced. With its explosion comes the Brazilian and Colombian soap operas, imitation jewelry made in China, and a steadily invasion of Western tourists. It is Good-bye Lenin, indeed, although you are still years away from the German film.
In three years, you find yourself at your friend John’s house in Stockwell, almost on the border to Brixton, about to taste baked beans on toast. You’re confused, since you are finally in Europe, but strangely in England—as far as the continent as possible. You chew and chew because it has been a long day of discovery and emotions in that never-imagined London. You are obviously hungry, but cannot reconcile the taste of baked beans on toast with any scene from Fellini or Truffaut. So you have to expand once again the boundaries of your Europe in a manner that irritates you, because outside your island—and light-years away from the perfect world of your childhood, despite lacking apples and pears—the world seems too impossible to be known, too diverse to be insipid.
IV.
In the summer of 2015, walking along the banks of the Danube near Budapest’s Parliament Building, you realize that it has been ten years since you first landed in Europe. Despite all that time you feel unable to summarize all your experiences in just one reference, a marker of past memories—the imperfect acorn you drew as a child, for example, or the forgotten taste of apples in Cuba. You find there are as many corners of the continent still as unknown to you as huge portions of your native island, especially after 1989, when travelling became so demanding that you gradually refused to venture outside beyond city or your province. You have talked to friends about what Europe means, but you always end up connecting it to distinctive landscape or with a peculiar object.
However, when you start to compile all the representative images, you also recognize that the vast majority of them relate more to the friends who accompanied you than to any other apparently important feature. So, for instance, that beloved remembrance of a long walk by the banks of Lake Geneva, from Lausanne to Montreux in Switzerland could only retain a personal connection to your idea of Europe because of your friend Kathy, with whom you spoke during the entire walk. Together, you reminisced about the lost university days in the early 1990s when everything seemed so uncertain and fragile. Or that brief encounter with the Cantabrian Sea in San Sebastian, where your friend Tadeo took you, unaware of your disappointment with the English and Welsh shores where the water looked grey and unwelcoming.
Although in terms of maritime appreciation nothing tops the seaside in Lisbon, where your then girlfriend, now wife Helena introduced you to that outburst of light and colors that is Portugal, her country. And that could be Europe, you think, imbued by the need to classify your experiences. But few trips would match your previous idea of the continent with the real experience of it, like the one you make to Oslo, visiting your friend Soriano, who like you is about to reach a decade in diaspora. Up in the hills, near the ski-jump facilities of Holmenkollen, overlooking the fiord, among enormous evergreen pines you will remember your geography teacher who passionately taught you about the different climates and phenomena. He had never seen nor would ever see such a landscape, and yet managed to instill in his students the thirst for knowledge, and the admiration for local and foreign territories.
Then you realize that Europe is not just an experience, an object, or a taste. It has become a space, an area where memories and experiences come together to allow you to be just you—and that this vast area of landscapes, city tales and stories can be shared with friends in similar circumstances. Of course you have encountered some hostility, while visiting those still adamant about renouncing their strong sense of Cubanness, eager to show you and even convince you that it is possible to be Cuban living as far off the island as possible. For them Europe appears to be a mere stop in a delayed trip to nowhere, and their stay is nothing but temporary. You cannot be so sure, and believe it would be impossible to compare yourself to them. After all, you have not mastered the perfect congrí, or the most succulent black bean potage. You don’t spend your afternoons combing the most multicultural corners of the city in order to find groceries as similar as the ones in Cuba, carrying green plantains and cassava from African territories, or big juicy mangos from Pakistan. You still listen to them, because you like their company and their stories. It has been so long since your last attempt at an authentic Cuban meal that you can only be humble and thankful for a friend’s efforts. Yet you appear puzzled at their interpretation of Europe—did they not take drawing classes when they were children growing up in revolutionary Cuba?
Nevertheless, you turn more sympathetic when you think about how diverse human experiences can be, even when reading those comments on diasporic Cuban websites and blogs. Your compatriots remark that there is only one possible reality to invoke back in the 1970s and 1980s, that of a repressive system where nobody used to paint acorns or imagine the taste of a spicy apple. And, after all, they could be right, you concede, because memories are not common to all, even in that commonly understood society of the Cuba of your childhood. Perhaps, you think, the idea of Europe can never be expressed in such essentialist terms, like those exasperating online debates you have voyeuristically witnessed, where Cuba is evoked as round and plain as an apple. There, nation and national identity are defined in binary form, is either this or that.
Aiming for a more complex way to understand that the once unknown continent has come to encompass difference, to explain it, represent it, you think that perhaps Europe means something different for you. But then one unusually warm spring night many years after, fast-pacing down Lyndale Avenue on your way home after the rain, you will stop yourself to observe over the wet and shiny sidewalk, the leap of a tiny frog negotiating the distance from one side of the street to the other. And you will wait, as you are the only passerby, and your street is known for its short length and its almost inexistent traffic. However, the scene will appear weird to you. Besides circumspect humans, seasonal birds and battered foxes, you have lived in London for so long without encountering other living creatures that you have ended up believing in the total absence of wildlife. For a moment, in fact, when the city is quiet and dark, except for the street lamps, you believe that you and the frog are the only remaining inhabitants of the city. Later, however, when trying to make sense of the event and how it can summarize your European memories, you will feel confused, disoriented. Besides the context—the rain, London, and everything else—you recognize that a frog leaping in front of you, announcing its existence in such a way, is an event that could only have happened in Cuba. Where children draw strange fruits in the classroom, and acorns still do not grow on trees.