HAVANA, Cuba. – I don’t remember when I smoked the first cigarette in my life, nor under what circumstances I lit that white cylinder full of sting and nicotine. It must have been part of one of those many euphoria that accompany youth. Maybe I did it out of imitation, out of a desire to repeat what the closest elders did. I don’t remember where I was when I absorbed the smoke from that first puff.
I don’t remember the environment and the companies after so long. I think, I already warned, I smoked to imitate my elders, to “grow faster.” It was in my distant adolescence when I began to swallow cigarette smoke. And it all happened in those scholarships in which the power brought us together to “educate” us, according to their dogmas. They indoctrinated us and I secretly lit the white cylinder to then release the smoke and contemplate those spirals in their ascents.
I smoked and created wisps of smoke, corrupting the environment and especially my lungs. I smoked and made those wisps of smoke that dazzled me in their rises, in the dissipations they provoked in me. I smoked, I think, to be a rebellious man, to endure confinement in those scholarships in which the communists tried to indoctrinate us, away from our parents, while we smoked and smoked incessantly, also out of rebellion.
And that compulsive smoking was, without a doubt, a sign of disobedience. It was a big and very emphatic one, a way of telling the teachers that they were not our tutors. I smoked. And how I smoked! And the worst thing is that I still smoke. And the attachment became so great that I even later wrote a novel with the title tango and fumardera. Smoking I wait was the title of that novel in which Virgilio Piñeraa chain smoker, traveled to Buenos Aires to destroy Eva Perón’s mummy.
And now I sing the same song a thousand times: “Smoking I wait…”, but I don’t smoke. I do not smoke nor do I let out those wisps of smoke that always rise to vanish at the top; but there are no longer wisps, there is no smoke because smoking in Cuba stopped being a pleasure, because smoking became a nightmare, one of the many misfortunes that those of us who live in the country of the “best tobacco in the world” suffer.
And I suffer, perhaps because my body must be full of all that nicotine that has been sedimented in it since I entered the scholarships. And that nicotine that the many cigarettes left in me is revealed today. Those cigars that turned out to be delicious in Cuba now became unpleasant and annoying. And they are unpleasant and annoying because they disappeared, because they barely appear for those who have dollars or a lot of money to pay the very exuberant prices in national currency.
A box of H. Upmann already reached the price of 600 pesos, but tomorrow that price will be somewhat higher, or perhaps much more. Every day we notice a new cost that grows without the slightest modesty, and its growth is as great, and is as persistent, as that of sugar, which has already reached the figure of 400 pesos for a pound. And I find it curious, and even painful, that those two “products”, tobacco and sugar, were, at one time, the “magnet center” of the economy on this Island, and for a long time.
Without a doubt, there is no longer the possibility of waiting for the tango man, or the woman, smoking an H. Upmann, and not even a Popular or a Criollo. The prices no longer allow you to quell your anxieties, and it will be worse if you want to accompany the cigarette with a small cup of coffee. Today a package of Spanish coffee has the “discreet” price of 1,500 pesos, while a pack of cigarettes, as I said before, goes for 600.
The cigarette, which was once our dissipation and even a sign of rebellion, today is just an entelechy. And it would be better not to get into the field of coffee, in that coffee that we drink when it arrives from beyond the seas, and with a big, rather enormous, price. Today a box of cigarettes costs 600 pesos and 1,500 for a Spanish coffee without any tradition…
Coffee and cigarettes are also a cultural heritage, and they are also a transmission of beliefs that were bequeathed to us by those who populated this archipelago before us. And tradition is a guarantee for truth. And it is also a truth that coffee and tobacco have inhabited us for a long time, and abandoning them would be a sacrilege, a loss of those identities of which we have lived very proudly.
And in order not to be impertinent I will remember a communist poet whom I read very little. Félix Pita was his name, and he said something, or left it written, that is mentioned ad nauseam, and above all that phrase in which he warned that “forgetting the past is running the risk of leaving the future defenseless,” and I I then remind the communists, readers of Félix Pita, that our past is also the stability of tobacco and coffee, of their presence and prosperity.
