I return to Havana from Madrid and in my suitcases I carry a heavy and symbolic load: soft nougats from Jijona, hard nougats from Alicante, also with toasted yolk, plus two bottles of El Gaitero Asturian cider and, as a special addition, two panettones. These are the essential accessories that my mother, almost a centenarian, demands of me on every auspicious occasion to celebrate Christmas and the arrival of the New Year, just as she understands it should be.
Already in the living room of his house, the same house where I was born and where I still live, stands the little Christmas tree made of plastic fibers that my brother living in Miami brought to my parents some time ago to replace the already very rickety predecessor of role that provided its services every December for more than thirty years. Meanwhile, on a corner table a nativity scene of the Baby Jesus has been set up placed in his manger. It is an altarpiece that is increasingly missing clay figurines of shepherds or horses or turkeys, even one of the Three Wise Men, pieces that have been lost or destroyed over the many years of a presence that began back in 1954 or, no doubt, , in 1955. The date is confirmed by a photo that must be in a drawer at home, a black and white image in which I appear, three months old, nestled in a car between my parents, then in their twenties, and next to a Christmas tree well populated with shiny balls and the birth of Jesus, with all its figures intact.
This is a ritual that is carried out every December in my house and that sometimes I think that we will stop following the day my mother is no longer here. Because my wife and I are one of the people who avoid celebrations with obligatory and scheduled joy. Birthday parties, for example, do not imply for us the need for celebration that in one way or another compels us to smile while receiving congratulations from friends and, sometimes, even enemies. And something similar has been happening to us for I don't know how long ago with Christmas celebrations. The end of the year, at least that's how I perceive it, is just another date that doesn't give me any other evidence that time passes and, the worst thing, is that it does so faster and faster.
Or maybe not: sometimes I think that, when the time comes when we place my mother's body next to my father's in the old cemetery in the town of Managua, on the outskirts of Havana, my wife, my brothers and I We should sustain the tradition that was so important to our ancestors. It would be a way to celebrate them, more than the holiday, because for people like them this tradition was not only an inherited custom, but for many years it also entailed an act of civic and cultural resistance.
It is documented that in 1962, to spice up the Christmas celebrations, the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, whose armed struggle had triumphed three years earlier—just between the last day of 1958 and the first day of 1959—announced, in one of his typical decisions , that each Cuban family would have a Jijona nougat for the celebration, and ordered the Alicante town a million-dollar figure of tablets that put the production factories in that Spanish region under tension. And yes, every Cuban family had its nougat.
That happy alliance between the nougat manufacturers and the Cubans remained in operation for several years until in 1969 when the Government of the island decided with the same fervor that it was not fair for some people to celebrate the Christmas holidays (after all, an old routine from other times, loaded with too many religious connotations), while so many other thousands of compatriots would be working non-stop for a single day in the fields of the island cutting the cane that would allow the manufacture of 10 million tons of sugar that would be the springboard for the economic leap that would take the country out of underdevelopment. And, since then, with more or less cane to cut and sugar to produce, the elimination of Christmas celebrations was practically decreed, which, due to their meaning, were foreign to socialist ideology and the philosophy of scientific atheism.
Many Cuban families complied with the official decision. Others, including mine, resisted doing it and every December in the living room of my house the same Christmas tree was erected, increasingly deteriorated, with fewer glass balls, and the Birth of Jesus was also set up, already affected with the absence of characters and extras, but with its manger in the center and the star of Bethlehem illuminating the montage.
That act of silent resistance, sustained in the domestic space, had in its essence a meaning that went above any political or even religious condition. It was the most conducive setting for the family to feel like family and have dinner on Christmas Eve at a table where they always made sure, even in times of great scarcity, that there was no shortage of roast pork, black beans and cassava seasoned with garlic and sour oranges and, for dessert, if it had appeared by some mysterious route, a Spanish nougat or, at least, a modest Cuban substitute. The Asturian cider, of course, was more complicated, but with whatever we had, as a family, we wished each other a Merry Christmas and… a prosperous New Year.
In 1998, when Pope John Paul II visited Cuba, one of the requests he made to the Cuban Government was the restitution of the Christmas holiday, at least December 25, and his claim was accepted. Christmas returned to Cuba, but quite battered, like so many traditions battered by restrictions and interruptions, and without the components of other times, especially those nougats and ciders that characterized them.
Every year that I have been able, I have tried to ensure that Christmas in my house has its most typical gastronomic accessories, while my brothers and my mother are in charge of the allegorical decoration: tree and nativity scene.
And this year we are going to celebrate, with nougat and cider included, because we need to celebrate. Because we deserve to celebrate, at least for the very important fact of being able to continue living, here and now, accompanied by some of our affections. We are going to celebrate in a country that, in a situation – at some point the current Cuban Government has called this critical period that way – full of deficiencies, material and physical absences – the pig has become an exotic animal and in two years they have emigrated almost half a million compatriots—, a time of shipwreck of so many hopes and while the world experiences more and new wars, more and new crises. But again we will be able, together with my almost centenarian and still very lucid mother, my wife Lucía's mother and perhaps some friends who have not yet dispersed around the world, eat these endearing Spanish nougats, break one of the panettone (we will have hidden the second one so that my wife and I can enjoy it in pieces) and toast with the Asturian cider, as Cuban tradition dictates, and wish that next year will be that auspicious year that we long for so much. The best year that, like the celebration, we also need, we also deserve. We and all of you…
So, Merry Christmas… and a Happy New Year!
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