And So On...

They were two teenagers coming from Spain in the same boat and they were my grandparents on my mother’s side. And my mom a bright girl (she still is) got married with the love of her life twice. And I grew up, studied, loved... and one night a man who was white, to rob me, cut me on the head. And from the woman who closed the glass door I understood her fear, but not her answer, and the one who took me to the hospital was a boy, and the doctor who treated me and closed my wound was not young or white... and I kept on living, sometimes with fear and many more without it. And I wrote the poem "Others sharpen the knives", to remember...

And to my African brother, from Mali, who sang Silvio's songs with me, the heartbreak of a woman pushed him from the 18th floor... and I kept going... and I had a life inside me, for a man of distant Indian blood, who in the end didn’t want to be a father. And my beautiful friends who were a couple took care of me at home. And friends of all colors and of all choices wrote poems for her and searched for songs named Daniela... and a Christian hand still caress scars, and another iyabó hand still sends love messages...

And so on...

To get a look at it I have qualified and classified it, but while life goes on, in reality, I only see people exercising their humanity, or their lack of humanity. To contemplate a group, an idea, a cause, a right to win, it’s necessary to separate the part from the whole, but knowing that life is a fabric that intertwines threads of all colors and thicknesses ... So yes ... I know myself a WOMAN and I know the battles I fought and those I won, and the ones to come too, but I care about PEOPLE, men, women, gays, lesbians, whites, blacks, believers of various kinds, Cubans and foreigners..., and the rest categorizations. And no one who is like I think should be a person of integrity, can say that because of me as a woman not any of them can speak... and vice versa...

So on August 23rd, especially to those who belong to the Federation of Cuban Women, and also to those who accompany us: Congratulations... just as we are, here we are

Taken from the author's Facebook site

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff