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Chapter One, page 4
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in my world
there was no such thing as good luck. My family lived in a one bedroom
apartment for which my parents paid twenty-five pesos a month, or a
little less than 20 percent of my father’s salary. Because the government
had confiscated all private property, we never knew who the original owner
of the apartment
had been. As far as we knew, it was ours. No one could kick us out, as my
teachers often told me capitalists used to do to the poor who couldn’t
pay the
rent. But we also had no chance to win a house or even a bigger apartment
by
testing our luck. In my world people earned the right to have things through
hard
work and the right political attitude, not because they were lucky.
The people I knew earned coupons to buy plastic blenders or Russian-made
washing machines by working long hours in their jobs six days a week and
then
volunteering to work on Sunday for the good of the country. They cut sugarcane
in fields far from their homes, helped build homes for those who didn’t
have any,
or labored overtime in factories to meet production quotas and maybe even
earn
thr right to buy a refrigerator. My father worked hard, harder than many
others,
I knew. And yet until the day my father brought that black Russian box home,
I
had never switched on a television set.
Go ahead, turn it on, my father said, as if reading my mind. Gently.
A simple switch of a button to the right, and a light appeared on the center
of
the screen, where it flickered for a while, and then, as if by magic, the
screen
opened.
There was nothing on; programming didn’t start until later in the day.
The
family sat on the couch smiling, watching vertical stripes on top of a large
horizontal
stripe until we got bored. At 5:45 P.M. an old Argentine film came on, and
we all watched attentively, eating bread with oil and salt, our favorite
snack.
An hour later, just as the movie was nearing its end, the power went out.
A
nightly blackout, a few hours without electricity, was a common occurrence
in
Cuba, and especially in my neighborhood, Santos Suárez. There were
no diplomats
where we lived, no foreign students, no Eastern European comrades—the
only outsiders who visited Cuba then—so my neighborhood was a convenient
one to keep in the dark. No one complained. To whom? For what? Most people
