Flight to Freedom

by Ana Veciana-Suarez

  Monday, 17th of April

  I must write quickly and without making noise. I do not want the teachers or the other girls to figure out that I am not really in need of this toilet except as a makeshift desk. Earlier today we arrived at La Escuela al Campo after a long, miserable, dusty bus ride. The boys took one bus, the girls another. Though a lot of the older girls were singing and carrying on, I was miserable and scared. The scenery, at least, was beautiful—green rolling hills and tall palms—and whenever we passed a guajíro leading his mule or oxen, we waved. The farmer would wave back.

  A barbed-wire fence circles the compound. There’s a row of small outhouses behind our dormitory, which is a long, crude building made of the woody part of palm fronds. When the wind blows, it whistles right through. (Sometimes the sound, high-pitched and off-key, reminds me of my grandmother singing one of her favorite songs, “Bésame Mucho” or “El Manisero.”) It gives me goosebumps, the wind’s howling.

  Thursday, 20th of April

  The beds are deplorable. Beds, is that what I wrote? They are really pallets, burlap stretched between two logs, and there are dozens of them, each lined up no more than two feet from the other.

  Because we are divided by age, I have not been able to speak to Ileana yet. She sleeps on the other side of the dormitory. I would crawl over there in the dark if I could, just to see a friendly face, even if only to hear her say, “Boba-bobita,” which is what she likes to call me, but I am afraid to get caught.

  Monday, 24th of April

  We are awakened by the teachers before the rooster’s crow, and we must get ready in ten minutes in the dim light of kerosene lamps. (It is like traveling back in time. Kerosene lamps, imagine!) A lot of the girls fumble and curse and yawn loudly while they dress. They even pass gas right there, without apology or embarrassment. There is no privacy or propriety here. It truly makes sharing a room with Ileana look like paradise. And to think I never appreciated it! Our breakfast consists of hard bread and strong coffee and occasionally slop that is impossible to identify. Oats, maybe. (Sometimes at night, I fall asleep thinking of my hot café con leche and toasted Cuban bread, slathered with butter—if my mother has been able to get butter and milk that month with her ration coupons, of course.)

  Then we go to work in the fields or in the curing barns. Some of us have been assigned to stack the dried tobacco leaves in piles called pilones. We must do this in a rectangular compact mass, and then cover it with plantain leaves. I am not quite sure what Ileana does, but I think that because she is older, she must help in the harvesting. Morning is the best time of day in the barns, because it is not so hot and there is often a breeze. In the afternoons, it is sweltering and unbearable. Several girls have already fainted, but I refuse to give anybody the pleasure of seeing any weakness in me.

  Most of the girls I already know from school, but we do not have much time to talk when we are working, and at night we are all too exhausted. I also remember what Mami told me: “Keep to yourself. Don’t trust anyone.” I talk mostly to a girl named Alina, but never for long and only of frivolous things. I feel sorry for her. She has terrible acne, and the other girls call her Granito.

  Many other girls here are mean. They push and shove in line for meals. They make fun of each other. They claim that their father or mother is the head of the neighborhood’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, or that the family belongs to the Communist Party. They expect to get privileges or respect this way, but it is all for show. Nobody wants to appear weak, and everybody wants to be more revolutionary than the next person. I feel sorry for us all.

  Wednesday, 26th of April

  I will spend six weeks here, and the thought of it makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs. How I will survive this I do not know, and so far from home, too. It reminds me of Pepito and how he must feel now that he has been drafted into the armed forces and is sleeping in a barrack full of strangers. My poor brother. How I wish I had been nicer to him.

  A few days in this place, and already I sense I am becoming an ant, tiny and insignificant, one of many. So tonight, to keep my mind off my ant worker life, I have given myself one goal: I will not cry. No, no, I will not. This is what I have promised myself. God and Virgencita, Our Lady of Charity, please please help me.

  Friday, 28th of April

  Ileana was right. We rarely attend school in the afternoon. There is always some task to perform for the good of the revolution. Anyway, we went to school today, but it was a waste of time because all we did was read Fidel Castro’s speeches. They are so long!

  Sunday, 30th of April

  Mami always tells me that if you concentrate on positive thoughts, you can keep yourself happy. It is so difficult to stay positive in this place, though. The only thing I know to do is to remind myself that my situation could be worse. For example, I know there has been talk among people in government about sending students to a country boarding school, where students work and study the entire school year, not just forty-five days. They would only be able to go home on a weekend pass. If the people in power decide to do this, it would be terrible for the children. The parents, too, because I know how my mother and father suffered when Pepito was drafted and when Ileana left for the country school in past years.

  Wednesday, 3rd of May

  We had a surprise inspection this afternoon. One of the teachers found you, my sweet friend. She opened you up, glanced through the pages, then threw you back onto my pallet. Phew! My whole body was shaking when this happened, but now I realize she probably could not read my handwriting without her glasses. My letters are tiny, and for good reason. I want to pack as much as I can onto the page.

  I hate being fearful of everybody and everything. It makes me feel helpless.

  Friday, 5th of May

  Some of the crueler girls have nicknamed me Concen, short for conceited, and when I first heard it aloud, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. But I bit my lip hard so as not to cry in front of them. Now I do not care. They cannot touch me. They cannot hurt me. Their words are nothing, and I pretend that my heart is like a boulder, too hard and too heavy to turn. It feels like that anyway.

  Saturday, 6th of May

  Cannot write much. I have blisters on my hands.

  Tuesday, 9th of May

  Going to the bathroom last night to write, I ran into Hilda, the self-appointed spy of my group, Girls of the Vanguard.

  “Why do you spend so much time in the bathroom every night?” she asked me.

  “Use your imagination,” I answered.

  “What do you have in that bag?”

  “None of your business.”

  She tried to grab it from under my arm, but I pinched and scratched her. She complained to Comrade Nilsa, but I explained that I had my menses, and that the bag contained sanitary napkins from home, a precious commodity here. I was not punished, but neither was Hilda. I hope she dies in the Zapata Swamp, attacked by a million mosquitoes and swallowed by quicksand.

  Sunday, 14th of May

  Mami came to visit and brought both Ileana and me a bag of canned meat she had bought in Havana’s black market. I was so hungry that I wanted to eat it all at once, but she made us promise that we would pace ourselves for the remaining weeks.

  Mami cried when she saw us. I wanted to, too, but I held back so as not to make her feel worse. She gave Ileana a long speech about being careful with the boys who work the fields and sleep in barracks on the other side of the camp. Usually Ileana rolls her eyes at a lecture, but she did not do that this time. I hear from other girls that there’s a lot of hanky-panky going on among the older students, that the girls do not keep their curfew, and the teachers do not supervise them properly.

  To be able to make the trip to see us, Mami had to show up for roll call at Havana’s railroad station twice during the week to ensure she would not lose her seat on the Parents’ Train. It left Havana at midnight and arrived early this morning in the nearby town of Ovas. She then ha
d to walk along a sandy road from the station to the camp with the other parents. One of the girls told us that this journey is several kilometers, but Mami insisted it was just a short distance. I think she said that so we wouldn’t worry.

  I hated to see her go. So did Ileana. And you should have heard all the other girls crying when their parents left, too. The weeping was like the wind whistling through the wooden walls of our dormitory.

  Tuesday, 16th of May

  I have no energy left. We have been given a quota of work, but it has changed so many times in the past week that I cannot remember it. Besides, it is already obvious that nobody will be able to meet these figures. We are all city girls, unaccustomed to the labor of the fields. This fact does not seem to matter, however, and the labor supervisors have organized marathon workdays starting at dawn and lasting until 10 P.M. I am so tired I can barely pick up a pen.

  Some of the girls want to strike. They say if we all stop at once, we can demand better food, fewer hours, and maybe even early release home. After all, we should not be treated as prisoners. We are supposed to be volunteers, these girls say. I agree with them, but I do not trust them. I think they are what my father calls infiltrados, spies. They are trying to trick us, trying to test our commitment to the revolution, before ratting on us. I will not fall for it.

  Yet, I wish I could scream out how I really feel. Rub it in the face of Comrade Nilsa and Comrade Marta, who make us read Fidel’s speeches aloud when we are exhausted, who taunt us if our parents are not members of the Party, who give us extra duties if we even smile at a counterrevolutionary joke. Right now I feel like a pressure cooker, ready to burst.

  Friday, 19th of May

  Is this hell? Surely it is, and somebody has forgotten to tell me. More later, when my arms do not hurt so much.

  Saturday, 20th of May

  Happy birthday to me! I am thirteen years old. Happy birthday to my country, too! Today is also Cuban Independence Day, which is why my parents named me Yara, for the Grito de Yara, though that happened not in May but on the tenth of October in 1868. On that day, we Cubans made a proclamation of independence from Spain. A ten-year war soon followed, but it was not successful. We truly did not break away from the Spanish until the turn of the century, and now we celebrate both in May and in October.

  We had a program in the afternoon, parading around some flags and listening to speeches by the older students. One girl who looks like a donkey talked about our responsibilities to the revolution. Another spoke about how we are the New Man and the New Woman, the generation Cuban Independence hero José Martí dreamed about. Blah, blah, blah. I was miserable. Nobody remembered my birthday. Not even Ileana. Well, maybe she did, but we were unable to talk.

  Sunday, 21st of May

  Though we were exhausted to the point of collapse, the teachers called a meeting tonight because they found antirevolutionary material among our possessions. Of course I immediately thought of you, my little book, my only consolation. My legs shook and my head pounded. But no, thank God, it had nothing to do with me or with anything I own.

  One girl was discovered to have a Bible, and another had a gold-edged prayer card of Our Lady of Charity. Both things were confiscated, and the girls were given extra duties. After all those hours in the fields, they must now help clean the bathrooms. Outhouses, really. God save me from that. Those bathrooms smell putrid and at night they are full of toads and frogs.

  I do not understand how this kind of punishment can be allowed. Who gave these comrades power? A government that made promises of democracy and freedom only to go back on them?

  Tuesday, 23rd of May

  I miss everything: my mother, my father, the tiled porch at my abuelos’, the fresh watermelon batidos on hot summer afternoons. I miss clean bathrooms. I miss my own clothes. I miss warm baths. I miss ice water. I miss having time by myself. I miss the feel of my palms when they were soft.

  Sunday, 28th of May

  Three more days. Three, three, three. A magical number. I am counting them down with such joy. Then again, three has never seemed such an immense amount. Now I understand the concept of infinity that our mathematics teachers have tried so hard to teach us.

  Wednesday, 31st of May

  Home! Home! We are headed for home. And you, dear friend, are returning with me—a little dirtier, a bit more frayed, but happy just the same.

  Later

  Mami took one look at me and burst into tears. “You have become a woman!” she said, but it did not sound as if she was happy about it. Ana Mari said my skin is as brown as a nut. She rubbed her little fingers on the calluses along the palms of my hands.

  I am too tired to write. My bones seem to have liquefied.

  Monday, 19th of June

  I was told I would not be able to enroll in school next year because my family is planning to leave the country. “We do not want to waste resources on the useless,” one of the lead teachers told me. Useless? I receive top marks in most of my subjects. That’s what I wanted to tell her, but I had to bite my tongue as Mami has repeatedly ordered me to do. Besides, this news was not unexpected. It happens to many students. Marcos, our next-door neighbor, was kicked out of his last semester in high school because he refused to call his father, a Methodist minister, an antisocial scum in front of his classmates. I feel sorry for him because now he just hangs around the house and tries to do odd jobs. Marcos wanted to study dentistry, but because of his father’s religious beliefs, he won’t be able to.

  Tuesday, 20th of June

  We received a letter from Pepito. Actually, let me make a correction. We received an envelope addressed to my parents, José Calixto and Cecilia, in his handwriting, but it was open and empty. There must have been a letter in the envelope at some point, but it either fell out or the government censors kept it.

  The empty envelope did nothing to lift Mami’s spirits. Though I thought a letter—or in this case, a missing letter—could be considered good news because it must mean that Pepito felt strong enough to write it, it seems Mami thought otherwise. She insists that he must be in a dangerous situation, and therefore the government does not want us to read anything about his whereabouts. She tries to keep from crying, but the tears just roll down her face quietly. I wish Papi were here to console her. As it is, we have not heard from him since he left to work la agricultura.

  Saturday, 1st of July

  I walked over to Ofelia’s, but she would not even open the door. “Scat!” she ordered. “I will get in trouble if my mother sees you.” When she said that, my stomach turned. My eyes felt hot. I asked her again, but she would not answer any of my pleas. She has become a person I cannot recognize since she joined the Communist Youth. I can’t believe she would give up on our friendship so easily.

  Friday, 7th of July

  Abuelo Pancho’s face was the color of old ashes when he stopped by to tell us that Tío Camilo had been arrested for selling his farm products on the black market. Mami agreed to go with her father to the police station to find out more details, and now they have been gone for more than three hours. Ana Mari is whining that she is scared, and I do not know what to do with her. I’m scared, too. What if Mami is also jailed?

  I wish Ileana would return. She sneaked out to her friend’s house as soon as Mami and Abuelo went to the police, and we have not heard from her since.

  Saturday, 8th of July

  Because this was his first offense, Tío Camilo only had to pay a fine for selling his goods on the black market. He was also forced to spend the night in jail, though Mami and Abuelo Pancho tried everything they could to have him released. When he came to visit us this morning before returning to his farm, he looked like he had not slept at all. He was also very angry.

  “I did nothing that was morally wrong,” he bellowed. “These are my products from my farm worked by my hoe and my sweat.”

  Mami ran around closing the windows and shushing him for fear the neighbors would hear. Ileana and Ana Mari giggled. I fel
t horrible for Tío Camilo, but also for us. It is terrible to have to be afraid of always making the wrong move or saying the wrong thing. We live in a jail with no bars.