Cubans and The Art of Waiting
HAVANA TIMES – Many Cubans have learned to live with waiting. Not because they chose it, but because little by little it has become woven into everyday life, turning into a particular way of relating to time.
Waiting appears at different moments of the day and takes different forms. It is there in the person looking down the street, trying to see whether transportation will arrive; in those searching for a shared taxi to complete a journey; in the person asking whether a medication has arrived at a pharmacy; in someone holding on to an old part because perhaps tomorrow it might be useful for repairing something that has stopped working.
It is also there in the phones that are checked in hopes of a call from far away, in projects that are postponed, in answers that take longer than expected, and in the constant search for solutions to get through a day that is rarely straightforward.
Waiting is not always measured in minutes. Sometimes it accumulates slowly until it becomes part of the landscape.
That sensation of time stretching out, losing its usual measure, brings to mind The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí’s painting in which clocks seem to melt over a silent landscape.
Dalí’s clocks seem to speak of a different kind of time: a time that no longer advances with the precision of a mechanism, that becomes flexible, strange, almost suspended.
Perhaps that is why the image finds an echo in the everyday Cuban experience. As if part of life were unfolding inside that painting: in a space where the hours pass, but some answers remain frozen in place.
Because waiting is not simply about awaiting something that is missing.
It is also about learning to live while waiting for it to arrive.
It means reorganizing a day when a blackout disrupts a family’s routine. It means searching for alternatives when a need has no immediate solution. It means adapting plans when something that seemed certain no longer is.
Waiting settles into the home, the street, and memory.
It is there in the person holding on to a prescription, hoping to find the medication. In someone checking a screen for a message from a relative who lives far away. In someone looking at a broken appliance, knowing that repairing it will depend on finding a part that is difficult to obtain. In someone calculating how to make what is available last until the next day.
It is also there in those waiting for change.
A job opportunity. A personal project. A reunion. A new chapter for the family. The possibility that the future might be less uncertain than the present.
But within that waiting, forms of resistance also emerge.
Cubans have learned to support one another in the midst of it. A conversation while standing in line, a useful tip passed along, a recommendation, unexpected help. Small gestures that make a stretch of time that often seems far too long a little easier to bear.
Even humor emerges as a form of defense. A way of looking at difficulties without allowing them to take over life completely.
Perhaps the true burden of waiting lies not only in the hours it consumes, but in how it transforms people’s relationship with their own time.
Because it is one thing to wait for something, but it is quite another to become accustomed to waiting.
The first has an ending that can be imagined. The second can gradually become a way of life.
And while Dalí’s clocks remain suspended in the memory of art, many people continue to look at the real clock of their days, wondering how much longer it will be before what they are waiting for finally arrives.
In Cuba, sometimes time does not simply pass. It is also spent waiting.
Read more from the diary of Safie M. Gonzalez here in Havana Times.