Photo Feature by Nester Nuñez
HAVANA TIMES — In the house of the cobbler who mends shoes there is a small pink sign that says: “Thank you for your love,” and the moldy cassette tapes still keep useless audio tracks by Van Van, Irakere, Julio Iglesias, and Roberto Carlos. Perhaps also the voice of Ruben Blades and his tragic story of Pedro Navaja: “Around the corner of the old neighborhood I saw him pass by, with the swagger that tough guys have when they walk… His hands always in the pockets of his coat so they won’t know which one holds the knife.”
But the La Marina neighborhood, where the cobbler lives, is no longer that place of fights and threats. Like any other part of the city, people here are tired of resisting, of postponing personal desires, of normalizing shortages. They know that responsibility for the misery does not lie in individual effort but, above all, in the system. Everyone knows where the shoe pinches them.
The other thing is that time has passed over the cobbler’s house. Over his house, the neighborhood, the city, the entire country, and most of those of us who live in it. When I say passed over, I mean crushed. Though time, in truth, is not to blame for anything. When sacrifice stopped being a moral option and became a historical obligation, everything collapsed (…inside me, inside me, even my breath now tastes like bile, tastes like bile…).
The house of the cobbler who mends shoes is more of a museum of the revolution than any other.
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