A hospital and many emotions in Curitiba, Brazil

My Open Suitcase

By Dany Cesario

HAVANA TIMES – There are goodbyes you think you understand… until you have to live them.

I used to think that emigrating meant packing a suitcase, buying a plane ticket, and learning another language. I was wrong.

Emigrating meant hugging my two teenage daughters while trying not to let them see the fear I carried inside. It meant saying goodbye to my mother without knowing when I would feel the warmth of her embrace again. It meant leaving behind my home, my white coat as a doctor, my patients, and the life I had built over so many years, to start over from scratch.

I never imagined that my first profound encounter with the healthcare system outside Cuba would be from the perspective of the woman who waits, who cries, and who prays.

A few days ago, my husband was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident.

And there I was.

The same doctor who had spent so many years walking the hallways of a Cuban hospital with a stethoscope around her neck was now walking different hallways with a broken heart.

I wasn’t looking for a diagnosis. I was looking for hope.

As I watched doctors, nurses, physical therapists, nutritionists, and nursing assistants come and go, I couldn’t help comparing two worlds I know very well.

In Cuba, I learned that medicine could still be practiced even when almost everything was lacking. Here, I discovered a system where protocols, timing, and resources function like clockwork. They are two very different realities. Neither erases the other. Both are part of who I am.

Here, we were treated with respect, patience, and a humanity I will never forget.

And in the midst of all that gratitude, there was a pain no one could see.

That was when I understood that emigrating is not only about learning to live far from home. It is also about learning to suffer far from home. Because there are pains that never show up on an X-ray. Mine came down to not being able to hug my daughters and my mother when I needed them most.

I am a doctor who one day stopped caring for patients and found herself sitting behind the doors of an operating room—or across the table from a medical team—waiting for news.

Today, as I accompany my husband through his recovery, I understand that medicine neither begins nor ends with surgery.

It begins with the way someone looks at you.

With the patience of a doctor answering a question that a desperate family has already asked ten times.

With the hand that reaches out without haste.

With the sensitivity to understand that, besides the patient, there is also a wife trying to stay strong, two daughters waiting for news from afar, and a mother in Cuba living with the anguish of not being able to hold you in her arms.

Perhaps that is why My Open Suitcase was born.

Because there are suitcases that carry no clothes.

They carry an entire life.

They carry a family on the other side of the sun that has learned that distance is never greater than love.

They carry the memories that sustain us, the people and experiences that inspire us to keep moving forward, and the dreams we still hope to fulfill.

And although they sometimes weigh far more than they appear to from the outside, they also hold something that never loses its place: hope.

Because emigrating is not the end. It is the beginning of a story that I am still learning to live.

Read more from the diary of Dany Cesario here on Havana Times.