I look at this
and I don’t think
how beautiful.
I wonder
how much
the woman
who handed over the egg
had left
for herself.
Because in Cuba
even generosity
has a cost.
An egg
passed between two windows
is never
just an egg.
It is one woman
looking at another
and quietly deciding,
I’ll have one less today.
And still
my country
lives this way
loving
in the dark.
The truth is
I never stopped writing.
I just stopped bringing the words here.
The blog went quiet.
I didn’t.
I was still putting words somewhere.
Notes app.
Receipts.
Margins.
Napkins.
Any little place
that could hold a sentence long enough
for me to remember I existed.
Maybe that is what writing was for me then.
Evidence.
Something to prove:
this happened.
I happened.
I was here.
I carried my father’s ashes back home.
I thought I was carrying the end of something.
But Cuba does not let anything end quietly.
Cuba opened the family plot in front of me
and gave death a body again.
Marble in the sun.
Names cut into stone.
Men lifting bones into daylight
with their hands.
Hips.
Elbows.
Screws.
The hardware of people
who had lived long enough
to leave proof behind.
And there I was
with my father’s ashes
watching him return
to the people he loved.
Ashes beside remnants.
Dust beside metal.
Love beside what survived the fire.
No one tells you
grief can become physical again.
That one day
you may stand in Havana’s oldest cemetery
and understand the dead
are not gone in one clean gesture.
They remain in pieces.
Names.
Dates.
Boxes.
Bones.
Flowers under brutal sun.
And the daughter standing there
trying to look brave
while history is being opened at her feet.
Later
I escaped to a hotel bar
full of tourists
and borrowed signal.
His favorite beer
sweating in front of me.
Bucanero.
Amber.
Sugar cane.
Cold enough for the heat.
Bitter enough to sit beside grief
without asking it to leave.
I was a few drinks in
when I opened my phone
because there was nowhere else
to put it.
At the time
I thought I was writing
about signal.
I wasn’t.
I was writing
about grief.
About trying
to reconnect
after leaving a cemetery.
About sitting
on an island
where the outside world
arrived
in fragments.
Being surrounded
by tourists
while my father had just
been returned
to the soil that knew him
before I did.
And maybe that was language
coming back quietly.
Not as rescue.
Not as beauty.
As proof.
A small note.
A little place
where I had to leave some words.
Because even when the blog was silent
even when I thought language had left me
some part of me
was still keeping record.
Some part of me knew
I would need evidence later
that I survived the day
I carried my father back home.
In one photograph
my mother is carrying me.
In the other
I am carrying my son.
Same age.
Two women
holding their children
before life asked them
to prove
they could survive
being left.
She had me.
I had him.
And between us
something was left open
not a lesson
not a punishment
just the door
life forgot
to close gently.
My mother was six
when they left her.
Six.
A little girl
in a room
that was not home
a bed
that did not know
her body
a hallway
with no mother
coming through it.
People always have reasons.
Divorce.
Distance.
Survival.
History.
Fear.
But children
do not live
inside reasons.
They live inside rooms.
They listen
for footsteps.
They learn the door
before they learn
the world.
And still
that child
became my mother.
The best mother.
She is prose.
Not simple.
Never simple.
Prose like rice.
Laundry.
Hands.
A forehead checked for fever.
Call me when you get there.
Prose like love
with its sleeves rolled up.
She was a writer
but before I knew
her words on paper
I knew the language
she made in the house.
Food.
Worry.
Sacrifice.
The daily grammar
of staying.
She made motherhood
her full-time work
until it became
the pillars
holding up
our house.
Then there I am
same age
with my son
inside my life
still young enough
to believe
being loved
meant being held.
And life
asked me too.
Not at six.
Not in a school.
But in the room
where a woman
should never be left
with a newborn
and a body
still open
from becoming
a door for life.
I learned then
what my mother
must have known
too early:
that something
can leave the room
and still live
in the body.
But I stayed.
Not beautifully.
Not without fear.
But I stayed.
And maybe
that is what passed
between us.
Not the eyes.
Not the mouth.
The terrible grace
of becoming
the place
a child can return to.
She answered
with a house.
I answered
with my arms.
Two women.
Same age.
Different photographs.
Both carrying
a child
against the oldest
kind of fear.
And still
nothing in us
handed the child
back to the dark.
She stayed.
I stayed.
And maybe
that is the holiest thing
a woman can do
after the door
has taught her
its cruelty
stand there
with the child
in her arms
and refuse
to become
another leaving.
That girl
too Cuban to understand
that the room was poor.
Memory does not return whole.
It comes back
as floor
as heat
as an old television
as a dress on the body
as shoes on the feet.
My grandmother
and my aunts
dressed all of us.
They took fabric
that had already lived
bent over it
measured it
cut it
and somehow
made girls
out of remnants.
A hem.
A ribbon.
A sleeve.
The quiet proof
of being cared for.
And somewhere
between the port
my father’s hands
and whatever the sea
allowed to arrive
the best pair of shoes
I ever had
landed in his hands
then landed
on my feet.
Suede.
Not new.
They had belonged
to another child first
had crossed
another floor
another room
another life.
And still
they came to me.
No box.
No paper.
No explanation.
Only my father
bringing home
a softness
the world had already touched
and placing it
beneath me.
Imagine that
a country
with stones in the rice
and my feet
in suede.
A house
with very little
and me
standing there
adorned.
That girl
did not know
she was poor.
She knew cloth
could become a dress.
She knew shoes
did not have to be new
to arrive like mercy.
She knew a father
could bring tenderness home
without calling it love.
And there she was
small knees
white dress
secondhand suede
too young
to understand scarcity
old enough
to feel blessing
when it touched
her feet.
My memory is fragmented.
But maybe fragments
are the truest things I have
the dress
the shoes
the floor
the hands
the pieces
that survived me.
My mother and I share the same blood.
B Rh-negative.
The same rare inheritance.
The same river moving through us.
The same red history traveling from one body into another.
She carried me beneath her heart for nine months.
An entire season of becoming.
Blood teaching blood how to assemble itself.
Bone finding bone.
A spine.
A mouth.
Ten fingers opening toward a life neither of us had seen.
She made my body.
This is no small thing.
The original shelter.
The dark and sacred room where I began.
But the older I become the more I understand that being born from someone does not guarantee being understood by them.
The womb creates a body.
It does not necessarily create recognition.
My mother and I share the same blood.
B Rh-negative.
The same rare inheritance.
And still, we spent years trying to find a language large enough to hold us both.
My mother spoke.
God, how she spoke.
Stories.
Worries.
Grievances.
Disappointments.
The thousand daily abrasions of being alive.
She sat me down and handed me pieces of adulthood long before I was large enough to carry them.
And because I loved her
I did.
I listened.
I absorbed.
I learned the weather patterns of another person’s sorrow before I had learned my own.
I became her witness.
Her companion.
Her sounding board.
The child at the other end of conversations meant for grown women.
Perhaps that is why language became my native country.
Why I reach for words the way other people reach for prayer.
Why I cannot leave a question unanswered.
A feeling unnamed.
A loose thread hanging from the hem of a perfectly good life.
I learned early that everything must be examined.
Everything discussed.
Everything understood.
And I am tired.
Not of my mother.
Never of my mother.
I love her.
Love has never been the problem.
The problem is that love and understanding are often mistaken for twins when they are merely neighbors.
So we spent years waving to one another across a distance neither of us knew how to cross.
Then there was my father.
A man who seemed perpetually occupied by some private cosmic adventure.
A man of so few words that silence gathered around him like a second skin.
Yet I could sit beside him for an entire afternoon and feel more understood than I did in conversations that lasted years.
He never asked me to carry his grief.
Never handed me the weight of his interior life.
He simply made room for mine.
And when he died everyone assumed I was grieving a father.
What I was grieving was recognition.
The rare miracle of being witnessed without explanation.
Without performance.
Without the exhausting labor of translating myself into a language someone else might finally understand.
Perhaps that is why unfinished things haunt me.
Why I pull every thread.
Why I interrogate every silence.
Why I stand before mysteries demanding they surrender their meaning.
I spent my childhood holding one end of conversations that never seemed to end.
Of course I grew into a woman who wants answers.
Of course I became someone who believes every story deserves a conclusion.
But lately
I am beginning to suspect
that not everything unfinished
is broken.
That not every silence is withholding something.
That some people love us through language.
And others through presence.
That understanding sometimes arrives speaking.
And sometimes arrives and simply sits beside you.
The same blood does not guarantee recognition.
The same house does not guarantee understanding.
And yet—
love persists.
My mother and I
still waving across the distance.
My father gone and somehow still answering me.
The child I was
standing between them
learning two different dialects of devotion.
One made of words.
One made of silence.
And all these years later
I am still trying to become fluent in both.
It never took much to fill my stomach.
I thought that was simply the way I was.
A small appetite.
A child satisfied easily.
Years later I understood that hunger had already been negotiated long before the plate reached me.
The women in my family were experts at subtraction.
A little less for themselves.
A little more for everyone else.
No announcements.
No speeches.
No visible sacrifice.
Just small adjustments made so often they became invisible.
A spoonful here.
A portion there.
A second helping quietly redirected.
The mathematics of survival.
I never noticed it as a child.
Children rarely do.
I thought food simply appeared.
I thought dinner was dinner.
I thought everyone lived this way.
I did not understand that somewhere between the kitchen and the table, someone had already decided I would eat first.
This was Cuba.
Not the Cuba in photographs.
Not the Cuba tourists carried home in their suitcases.
A society of shortages.
Food shortages.
Soap shortages.
Fuel shortages.
Power outages that arrived without warning.
The endless improvisation required to survive them.
And yet the women continued.
They always continued.
I remember entire aisles filled with Russian canned meat.
The same can.
Again and again.
Shelf after shelf.
As though variety itself had become a luxury.
As though eating anything else had ever been an option.
At the time none of it felt strange.
Children accept the reality they are given.
The astonishing becomes ordinary very quickly.
I remember ash being gathered and sifted through cloth until only the finest powder remained.
No splinters.
No debris.
Only a soft gray dust.
Then the dishes were washed with it.
Astonishing, but true.
The meal fed the family.
The fire cooked the meal.
The ashes cleaned the plates.
Nothing was wasted.
Not food.
Not labor.
Not a single useful thing.
I remember the ash beneath their fingernails.
The smell of smoke that never seemed to leave their clothes.
The certainty with which they moved through scarcity.
As though survival were not remarkable.
As though it were simply what morning required.
Looking back, I realize they treated themselves the same way.
Reducing here.
Stretching there.
Giving and giving until very little remained.
And somehow still finding enough to offer.
Perhaps that is why it never took much to fill my stomach.
I was eating from portions made larger by the hunger of women who loved me.
I miss these women.
More than I know how to explain.
Not because they were perfect.
Not because they never failed.
Because they understood things I am only now beginning to understand.
The quiet negotiations of love.
The invisible mathematics of survival.
The dignity of continuing.
I see every version of myself in them.
The woman who worries.
The woman who nurtures.
The woman who remembers.
The woman who gives more than she should.
The woman who keeps going.
Sometimes I think inheritance has very little to do with what we are given.
Perhaps inheritance is recognition.
The sudden realization that the people we miss never truly leave.
They remain in our gestures.
In our habits.
In the way we love.
In the way we endure.
Today I feel as though I lived a life only fiction could properly explain.
Not because it was tragic.
Not because it was beautiful.
Because it was both at once.
The kind of life where dishes were washed with ashes.
Where store shelves repeated the same can until repetition itself became abundance.
Where women performed miracles and called it chores.
The women in my family were made of salt.
The proof was everywhere.
In the sweat.
In the sea surrounding the island.
In the meals that appeared when there should have been none.
In the hands that gave more than they kept.
In the quiet arithmetic that took place before every meal.
And when I look closely enough, I find them everywhere.
Including myself.
Cuba is like love
Beautiful enough
to ruin people
An island of salt and longing
where everything beautiful
learns to survive
beside absence
You carry it long after leaving
Cuba is like love
because it survives on contradiction
You stand before the sea
thinking something so beautiful
should have saved everyone
And yet beauty has never been protection
Still
people return to it in their minds forever
Like first loves
Like impossible loves
Like homes that continue living inside the body
long after the body has gone elsewhere
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
Took my first steps
On this corridor
Unleveled earthiness
Saw myself reflected
In a rush of energy
Becoming self aware
That I had just met my soul
It kissed my forehead
From birth to forever
With only God in between
Punctually swallowing
All of my blues
With such artistry
That when I glance at my children
I do it
With eyes closed
Because I too
Saw my life
Pointing back at me
The day my mother married
Hers, weeped
Futurity of leaving Cuba, gone
She grieved her only child
All efforts to bring her home, futile
Through the years
And under a fleet of angels
I saw myself
Reflected in her
Superbly waiting for motherhood
Incessant fire, love that burns
Like a tower, in me
familial • ashes
surrounding its coast
superb • is to forget
because •
in this • geology
anonymity is defeated
by flamboyant royals
their vast sweeping branches
its flowering habit
embracing an entire island
that has lost all hope
– Cuba 2026
Orbits of grace
At the in’s of me
Right here
I fall
110
Times a day
Like something
That still glows
Tucked, under
A single address
My land of traumas
Heightened with fear
A place that holds
My childhood
So terrifyingly
Deciphering torment
And the inability
To seek help
From people
Who watch you
Fall, in less dirt
Painful terrains
This is Cuba – 1979
Martyrs of disguise
Making parenthood
Less fiable
As everyone
Is too busy
Surviving
Their
Own
Imprisonment
I’ve been
A lonely walker
For decades
This life
Has taught me
To believe
That above my name
There is a vacancy
A beautiful sky
With blue lips
That speak for me
Making peace
For the rest
Of my existence
Like a road
That is long
Yet spangled
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 
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