Mari Sánchez Cayuso

Category: Cuba

  • Living in Exile

    America must understand this:

    No one leaves home
    because they are bored

    No one places oceans
    between themselves
    and the people they love
    for curiosity

    Human beings are not trees
    We do not rip our own roots from the earth
    unless the ground beneath us
    has stopped allowing us to live

    My parents were not chasing luxury

    They were chasing breath
    Possibility
    A future large enough
    for their children to stand upright inside

    And what courage it must require
    to leave behind everyone you love
    while pretending to your children
    that you are not terrified

    To smile on the journey
    To call sacrifice an opportunity
    To hide grief inside hard work

    America sees immigrants arrive

    But it rarely sees
    what they carried here invisibly:

    The funerals they missed
    The mothers they could not hold again
    The fathers who grew old
    in photographs

    There are people in this country
    who have spent decades
    loving their homeland from afar
    like one mourns someone still alive
    but impossibly unreachable

    That is exile

    Not politics
    Not headlines

    Exile is waking up some mornings
    unable to explain
    why your heart aches
    for a street that no longer exists
    the way you remember it

    And still
    They build
    They work
    They love this country too

    Because gratitude and grief
    can live inside the same body

    Because human beings
    are capable of carrying
    two homes at once

    The one that made them
    and the one that finally allowed them
    to dream without fear

  • Freedom’s Address

    My childhood home stood two blocks from the sea

    Not metaphorically

    Truly

    Two blocks of crumbling pavement
    past the embassies with their iron gates
    and foreign flags lifting beautifully
    in the Caribbean wind
    like freedom had an address
    and we did not

    I remember the terrible contrast of it

    chauffeurs polishing black cars
    while old women downstairs
    watered thin soup to feed five mouths

    Diplomats drinking imported whiskey
    behind guarded glass
    while boys in torn sandals
    kicked flat soccer balls through alleyways
    smelling of salt
    kerosene
    and exhaustion

    And yet the ocean belonged to everyone

    That was the unbearable beauty of Cuba

    The poor could stand at the Malecón at dusk
    beside men who had never missed a meal
    and both would fall silent
    before the same enormous water

    Because the sea did not care
    who was oppressed
    and who carried a passport out

    It touched every stone equally

    At night
    the waves struck the seawall so hard
    the spray reached the streets
    cool against our faces
    like the island itself
    refusing to die quietly

    I grew up understanding freedom
    not as politics

    but as distance

    As horizon

    As the ache of watching ships
    become smaller and smaller
    until they dissolved completely
    into another life

    Some nights
    the grownups lowered their voices
    when certain subjects entered the room

    But the ocean
    the ocean never whispered

    It roared openly beside us

    Restless
    Uncontained

    I think that is why Cubans carry sadness
    so elegantly

    We were raised beside something infinite
    while living inside limitation

    Raised hearing waves
    crash against stone
    over
    and over
    and over again

    as if the earth itself
    believed no wall
    should remain standing forever

    Even now
    far from that coastline
    I still need water near me

    Not for leisure
    Not for beauty

    For memory

    Because somewhere inside me
    there is still a little girl
    walking toward the sea at twilight
    past embassies glowing gold
    past tired buildings collapsing inward
    past the unbearable divide
    between the free and the trapped

    believing
    with her entire heart
    that the horizon meant
    there had to be more than this