These snapshots are inspired by Cuba. It is not a mystical delusion. You observe well. They are photographs taken in the snow. The point is that I was in a snowy region of Argentina, in the middle of a cold
dry and at temperatures below 0°C. In the midst of that white landscape, wrapped in layers and layers of clothing, I understood that I belong to that generation of Cuban men and women who had a close relationship
and even familiar with that solid precipitation, of tiny ice crystals that is snow.
In a figurative sense we could say that it “snowed” in Cuba at the beginning of the sixties, from the first bilateral relations between the nascent Cuban revolutionary government and its counterpart in the Soviet Union. There are the incredible photos of Alberto Díaz Korda taken of Fidel playing like a baby in the snow, during a famous 38-day trip that the then Prime Minister made in April 1963.
But the “snowfalls” intensified in 1972, with the integration of our country into CAME, the main economic organization of the disappeared Socialist Field. There began a marked kind of sovietization in our Caribbean daily life. And the snow – and other things – fell through movies, cartoons, magazines and products
all types.
Unforgettable those comics about Eskimos published in Misha, illustrated children’s magazine. And what about the photo reports with snowy landscapes of “Soviet Woman”, “Moscow News” and “Sputnik”? “Those magazines took you to winter also from fashion,” a friend tells me. By the way, some of these magazines were highly required to cover the school’s books and notebooks. Likewise, many of the walls of the rooms of the young people of that time were upholstered with collages of photos from those magazines. I even remember well that the notebook in the cellar of my family unit was for many years covered with a
clear plastic lining with a picture of a mountain covered in snow! With that snapshot, in which one could notice tremendous cold, he went to look for our daily bread in the cellar, with a suffocating
heat.
I go back to my childhood, when I was 6 or 7 years old. I see myself every evening, exactly at six, sitting in front of the television ready to immerse myself in the fantasies of children’s programming. It was a black and white television, mark Caribbean. Through that screen she enjoyed Cuban, Russian and Polish dolls. That’s how the Spanish General Resóplez appeared grumbling “What a country! What a country!”, in one of the chapters of Elpidio Valdés, overwhelmed by the heat, the mosquitoes and the rain in the Cuban jungle. And immediately he went on the screen from hot to cold. It played an episode of a wolf chasing a free in the snow, in the middle of a winter olympics. They were the animated “Nu, pogodí!” Or, as we popularly knew them, “Let me catch you.” I also remember “En la Yaranga Arde el Fuego”, a rather depressing animated short film about two brothers, Jato and Gajune, who set off in the Arctic in search of their mother, who had been kidnapped by a furious snow storm.
Around that time, after consuming so many Russian dolls, one day I asked my dad what it was like to be in a place full of snow. How was its texture? My father knew what he was talking about. He studied for a couple of years at a Komsomol school, the youth organization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I keep several photos of him in the snow. The one I like the most is the one where my thirtysomething old man is smiling, posing in the schoolyard, in the middle of a snowfall, dressed in a leather overcoat and a ushankathat traditional hat
of the Baltic regions.
Faced with my curious question, my old man took me to the refrigerator brand Kelvinator. She opened the door. She lifted me up to the frosty freezer and invited me to touch her. She then made some ice balls and gently tossed it at me. She also made a snowman like those snowmen that appeared in the movies. “It is so. A place with a lot of snow is like a giant freezer”, he told me smiling and imaginative.
With all that accumulation of fantasies and so many references, now you will understand why it is inevitable that these photographs are the reminiscences of a Cuban in the snow.
