A birthday reflection in verse for Fidel.
From the Sierra Maestra heights of your eighty-five years
what do you see when you look back
at the long journey, always uphill, that has brought you here?
This journey that began as a young man’s fierce, questing track
through the unending campesino poverty and Habana’s corrupt streets and palaces where
Uncle Sam’s Mafia nephews gambled for Cuba with goons and profiteers.
What do you see, El Commandante, when you scrutinize
a more than half-century of Revolucion?
Green fields of schoolchildren; muralled workplaces; the shared grain of material progress;
a peasant unbending upward, exclamation mark from his own question;
and between Moncada and Playa Giron, a people finding a lost consciousness.
Such memories no doubt must fill and overbrim your eyes.
But you see too the shadows of the clouds over your island:
thunderheads swelling; a threatening nuclear rain;
a fifty-two year siege; a bomb-barrage of lies; a strangling embargo;
638 assassination plots (and even now they still would try again);
a static swarm of truth-obscuring flies; the continuing insult of Guantanamo.
Yet Cuba’s history remains – imperial waves of onslaught that ebb into sand.
You faced the same devil-and-deep sea dilemmas Toussaint came upon,
determining who the ally, who the enemy.
Like him, you struggled, almost lost, then broke the rack
your country suffered on, undid the golden shackles, then when she was free,
met the irrational rage of the defeated master who wants his slave-mistress back.
It’s what they all want, whether the star-spangled emperors or Napoleon.
All this must be so clear from your Sierra Maestra height
I wonder how Cuba now seems from that view:
a young woman at a mirror, beautiful, trembling with unmade decisions;
a daughter, half-wanting to leave home and aching with her fidelity to you.
In a car outside, Uncle and madam wait, with gold anklets and white, powdery persuasions.
Cuba, in a fierce trembling at the mirror, eyes searching left, then right.
I’m tembling too. Till I remind myself: You raised her. Very well.
She’ll know how to keep both eyes open
to walk a path without the signposts you had, but still with your vision.
She’ll show a way, for her scattered archipelago family who have kept hope in her, in Caribbean civilization. Her history, El Jefe, has been your absolution.
Cuba, senor, is your best gift to yourself. And us. A happy 85th, Fidel.
Kendel Hippolyte
Aug. 1st, 2011.
Santa Lucía
|
