Historia, Part I

Jesús and I started as friends, messaging each other across a language barrier and 3,000 kilometers of distance. His first message to me was a Mother’s Day card, sent several weeks after we met in his garden and I made the impulsive, uncharacteristic, fateful decision to send him a friend request on social media. I hadn’t expected that he would actually communicate with me. I assumed he would simply linger on my friends list, perhaps clicking “like” on a photograph now and then. I hadn’t intended to reach out to him, but receiving the card emboldened me to overcome my fear of trying to communicate in a language I didn’t speak. I could at least manage gracias, amigo. So I responded, and soon Jesús and I were sending each other messages almost every day.

We talked about the weather, our families, what we liked to eat. We learned about each other’s children: the daughter he hadn’t seen in two years living in the U.S. with her husband, my 12-year-old girl and two young adult sons still living at home. He told me about the work he did every day in his garden and his struggles to support his elderly family members and his wife, Yuli, through health challenges and illnesses. When I asked how I could help when I returned to Cuba, Jesús asked me to bring powdered milk, gardening tools, and hard candy to help Yuli manage her blood sugar.

By the time I arrived back in Cuba with my then-husband and two younger children, Jesús and I had made plans for our families to spend a day together. We shared a meal he and his wife and his mother-in-law, Irene, cooked for us. We played dominos for hours. Jesús joked that it was a championship between two teams, the Mamey (for the tropical fruit that grows in his garden, whose name he uses as shorthand for anything wonderful) and the Manzanas (for the apples my children had picked at the same apple orchard each fall since they were toddlers).

We had arrived in Cuba carrying suitcases filled with everything we could think of that might be useful: coffee, scented hand soap, a box of 100 ballpoint pens, a jar of Nutella. Jesús and his family gave us gifts they had selected for each of us: cologne, a bottle of Havana Club, a glazed ceramic apple that still sits on a shelf in my bedroom. By the time we all took a selfie together on Irene’s front porch, our friendship was solidified in a manner impossible to achieve through texts alone. As I hugged Jesús goodbye, I was able to pick out only one word from what he said to me in Spanish: proxima.

Soon after we returned to the U.S., the tone of Jesús’s messages changed. At first there were only hints of a dark cloud forming, casual remarks nestled like ominous easter eggs among our otherwise lighthearted exchanges. Jesús and Yuli were watching a movie, and she had a slight fever. A fun group of tourists visited the garden and left Jesús a nice tip, and Yuli went to bed early complaining of pain. The sun was particularly hot that day and the expected rain didn’t arrive, and the doctor had dismissed Jesús’s concerns that Yuli could be developing pneumonia.

Then one day I didn’t hear from Jesús at all. I checked my phone repeatedly throughout the day, but no messages arrived. Finally, in the evening, I saw a banner pop up on my screen: Hoy fue el peor día de mi vida y no quiero repetirlo nunca. Today was the worst day of my life and I never want to repeat it.

Yuli spent the next month in the hospital. Jesús had been correct after all; it turned out she had both pneumonia and a kidney infection, which had caused her to collapse before being rushed to an intensive care unit. He traveled to the hospital every day he was allowed to visit. At night he sent me updates about her condition. He often slept at Irene’s house, next to his garden, which he said was more peaceful than sleeping at home alone. I sent shipments of strawberry yogurt and pear juice. On days when Jesús couldn’t speak to the doctors in person, they called Irene’s house with updates. Every day Jesús shared the news of Yuli’s condition with me, and I told him that I was praying for her recovery. One day, after repeating the same update he’d shared every day for more than a week – stable, no changes – he added: Everything is stable. Nothing changes. Yet nothing improves.

A week later, he sent me a message around 11 a.m. Yuli had passed away during the night.

I plunged with Jesús into the depths of despair. During the day he forced himself to go to work in his garden as he always had. He sent me pictures of happy tourists who couldn’t tell that the smiles he shared with them were forced. Some days there were no pictures, and his messages simply said lo intenté pero no pude hacerlo. I tried, but I couldn’t do it.

At night he poured out his grief, sharing photos of his and Yuli’s life together, telling me stories about how years ago she had held jobs in several different restaurants while he worked as an electrician and then later as a driver. How he now regretted all the time he’d spent away from home, working, missing his daughter’s milestones and the opportunity to share them with Yuli. How he and his brother had built the garden out of a desire to create a beautiful and serene space to be shared with others, to produce food and control their own destinies without having to answer to a boss. How they saved and saved their money, only to have to use it all when Covid shut the world down and there were no tourists to bring to the garden.

He told me about all the people he had lost, those who had died and those who had left Cuba. His beloved great aunt, a funny and confident mulatta who had no children of her own and was like a second mother to him. The son of a close friend, a good and hardworking boy who sailed off in a boat headed to Florida and was never heard from again. His daughter’s mother-in-law, a well-known chef who had published a book of dessert recipes and food art photography using his daughter as a model. He sent me photographs of photographs, sharing family pictures and documents and copies of the recipe book’s pages. Sometimes he had to stop writing because his tears covered the phone’s screen and he couldn’t read his own words.

A few days before the end of December, Jesús bought two beautiful bunches of flowers for Yuli. On the morning of New Year’s Eve he and Irene walked the three blocks down the gently sloping street next to his house, to the rocky coastline at the edge of town. There, they cast Yuli’s ashes and the flowers into the sea.