The Last Days of a House

The Last Days of a House / Regina Coyula
Posted on July 4, 2013

Once, many years ago, the little palace at 13th and 4th in Vedado was
the home of a family, a rich family who abandoned it also leaving behind
other assets at the triumph of the Revolution in 1959 to go into what
they thought was temporary exile and where nothing would even be the
same again.

Along with other family properties, the house was considered embezzled
goods recovered by the government and was then a diplomatic site for one
of our brother countries of Eastern Europe with us in the construction
of socialism.

I didn't know at what point the brotherhood changed in tone, and
socialism as well, and the mansion became an annex to the well-known
MININT (Ministry of the Interior) unit charged with checking telephone
transmissions, about 100 yards away; the annex was in charge of
monitoring email traffic.

The corner is shadowed by powerful poplars sending roots over the
sidewalk, the slender bars were boarded up with metal plates, and the
enormous house was safe from prying eyes and at the mercy of its new owners.

Sheds were erected, the arcades bricked in and the walls painted now and
then with treachery and cruelty to blacken later with humidity until it
became a blot on the landscape.

I couldn't fail to be surprised when I recently saw the metal plates
removed from the perimeter, restoring the garden with the addition of
streetlights, the little palace painted in the pastel shades they favor.
A second youth to host in its heart something like the site for the
struggle for the return to the fatherland of the anti-terrorist fighters
imprisoned in the empire's prisons, and the predictable and final
destination of the ex-member of the Party Central Committee and the
ex-president of the National Assembly of Peoples Power — and of so many
exes, extinct — Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada.

3 July 2013

Source: "The Last Days of a House / Regina Coyula | Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/the-last-days-of-a-house-regina-coyula/