The ferry that goes from Old Havana to Casablanca

By Caridad

HAVANA TIMES — It was a thirst for knowledge that consumed me. I lived in Cuba during the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century, and there was only one thing I was 100% certain of: life was slipping away from me without my ever really living it. To me, life has always been tied to knowledge. Libraries—computers and the internet were beyond imagination in those days—helped ease my anxiety, but I’m one of those people who need hands-on experience in order to learn best. After all, that’s what life is about too: putting knowledge into practice.

One day, a friend lent me a book by Carlos Castaneda that he had stolen from a foreign bookstore participating in one of Havana’s Book Fairs. My curiosity about metaphysics and subjects that go beyond “ordinary reality” multiplied after reading it, and at the following book fairs I made sure to stuff every Carlos Castaneda book I could find into my backpack.

Do I need to mention that our budget never stretched far enough to afford the luxury of buying a book priced in dollars?

There were no peyote cacti in Cuba. There was probably one somewhere in the Botanical Garden, but I assumed it would be extremely difficult to get to, and besides, I didn’t like stealing plants.

While we were studying what other natural means might exist for accessing those other, non-ordinary worlds, the friend of a friend—a lieutenant colonel’s daughter from the Ministry of the Interior—offered to share a marijuana cigarette with us… or two, since there were several of us that day.

We were in Old Havana, and we climbed onto a rooftop so the smoke would blend in with the clouds and the city’s unpleasant pollution. But within less than ten minutes the rooftop felt too small for all of us, and we decided to walk wherever our feet might take us.

We were near the Arch of Belén and soon came across a small open-air fruit market. The warm and cool colors of the fruit caressed our eyes, and our fingers delighted in the textures of their skins.

It was a feast without taking a single bite.

I imagine the vendors thought we were just a group of self-absorbed young people, or perhaps a little mentally slow. But I wasn’t thinking about that at all, because Havana looked different. The people seemed to be walking in a world parallel to my own. I didn’t exist; neither did they. Only the sensation existed.

I never stopped thinking, but unlike my usual state, I was able to do it more orderly. The voice that always spoke to me from inside my head had become more amusing, less stern.

We walked and walked.

We crossed the bay on the Casablanca ferry. That was an act of heroism: there was no way to board the Regla or Casablanca ferry without going through a police inspection.

When you’re under the effects of marijuana, you don’t lose awareness that you’re doing something illegal, which is incredibly stimulating, but it also unleashes and multiplies the usual paranoia Cubans live with. So, I don’t know whether the desire to ride the ferry was a poetic act or a suicidal one, or perhaps marijuana simply made us forget that we lived in a country where, despite being surrounded by water, it was almost a miracle to freely access a boat or ferry without strict supervision.

Fortunately, the cops on the ferry did not suspect that group of shaggy-haired guys and very thin or very heavy girls. We sailed filled with euphoria, as if we were truly doing something completely unprecedented in our lives, or as if we were on our way to other heavens.

I could almost reach out and touch the jellyfish floating companionably beside the old ferry as it lumbered through the black, putrid waters of the bay.

I don’t know who suggested we walk through all the brushland that separates the sea from La Cabaña fortress. Supposedly we would be safe there when it came time to light and share another joint. We walked in single file, and I felt like a National Geographic explorer, on the verge of discovering something that had always been there but that I had never managed to see with the proper eyes. To discover, to know, to go beyond, to understand. To escape.

Sunset came racing after us when we decided to sit on the reefs beneath the Morro Lighthouse. A woman was fishing there, and while watching her I composed a short novel in my head. Later it even won a prize and was published.

That was when I decided it would be wonderful to have more of that marvelous little herb within reach.

I was aware that if the police caught me, I would spend the rest of my days in prison—a prison even smaller than the one I was already living in. But being able to forget that I lived in a prison was incentive enough to take the risk. And honestly, at that moment I was so hungry for experiences that the prospect of imprisonment did not inspire the terror it really should have.

I managed to get some seeds, a flowerpot, and bought humus and a lightbulb.

I placed the pot in my room. I still lived with my parents, who were accustomed to my fondness for plants and animals.

When the little marijuana plant sprouted, my friends and I felt like inexperienced parents: euphoric, full of uncertainty, and infinitely responsible for the new being we had brought into the world.

Of course, we knew nothing about how to care for a marijuana plant, only a few instructions passed along by acquaintances, because it wasn’t as though Cuban libraries contained manuals on cannabis cultivation.

The girl began to grow, and my parents would poke their heads through the doorway, curious. I told them it was a bonsai.

Yes, nothing could have been more absurd, but they—both committed members of the Communist Party—believed me completely. They accepted that I was experimenting with bonsai trees, even though the plant eventually grew to more than 50 centimeters tall.

“A ceiba bonsai,” I would think to myself.

While my parents laughed every night at dinner about my inability to make anything with my hands, including, and especially, bonsai trees, I would simply smile and wait for the moment when I could light up those little green leaves.

Read more from the diary of Caridad, here on Havana Times.