Remembering Luis

It seems that most of my musings and meandering blog posts about Cuba have something to do with political advocacy, or economic challenges, or cultural observations. While I have a lot of interest in all these topics, they are not what keeps me so anchored there and feeds my longing to return. The strong pull on my heartstrings comes from personal relationships we have developed over the years. I'd like to share about one of those relationships and pay tribute to one of our dearest friends, Luis Pérez Martinto, who passed away suddenly week before last, having suffered a heart attack in his bed. When Kim and I received the news,

it was more than our hearts could handle. We walked down to the mountain stream to let our grief and a flood of shared memories join the currents of running water and make their way toward the ocean's depths.

All last year, I had the great blessing of visiting Luis in his home at least once a week. With the COVID restrictions and the lack of church gatherings, the pastoral staff at church divided up the neighborhoods so that all the members received a weekly check-in visit. I was happy to have Luis on my route. Once the restrictions eased and the visits moved from doorstep greetings to indoor conversations, we began working together. He (along with another good friend Melania), was helping me translate into Spanish a new book I am writing. We were well into chapter four by December, and then we had to put our work on hold when Kim and I returned to the states. One of my eager hopes for returning to Cuba was to pick up where we left off. As fate would have it, Luis himself was set to be the feature character of chapter five. I had started gathering stories of his to use in the book, but was eager to go back for more and fill in some details.

We also worked on some of Luis' projects on those weekly visits. He was a poetry translator for literary magazines, and he had a particular love for African-American poets (one of our last email exchanges was around Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem). During our visits, Luis would often get me to help him with some of the idiomatic and enigmatic phrases in a Langston Hughes or Maya Angelou verse. His latest project was a poem by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, "Flame-Heart." The title itself was enough to resonate with Luis, as his heart truly burned with the flames of compassion and passion for life. I take some solace in imagining a corner of heaven where the poets gather; I can just picture Langston and Maya and Claude welcome their adoring reader into their circle.

Luis also shared life stories with me on our visits, oftentimes painful stories. While he was known for his radiant smile, there was a shadow to that smile, cast by severe traumas he had endured in life, traumas he carried with him. In this aspect, I think Luis is representative of most of the Cubans I know—able to maintain an outward gaiety (he would love the double entendre), while sheltering interior grief and hurt. I am not breaking any confidence to say this about Luis, for he publicly shared some of his historic trauma, such as his time spent in the UMAP (a forced labor camp designed by the Cuban government in the mid 60s, a "conversion therapy" of sorts aimed at "re-socializing" those who did not fit the mold of the 'new man' of the Revolution, among them gay men). Luis would repeat this story to me, always with the line about how before UMAP he had a light in his eyes, and he left without that light; they had stolen it from him. He once showed me a photo of himself in his late teens, showing that gleam in the eye, and then he displayed the photo on the id card taken when he left the camp, without the light. Sometimes in telling the story his smile would return, as he remembered the one good thing that happened in the UMAP camp: it was there that he first fell in love.

I thought about this and other stories as I sat by one of the springs that feeds into the stream below our house. I confess that I have a strange habit of talking to the water as it emerges from the underground aquifers, saying things like, "Welcome to the sunlight! You're in for a great adventure! You'll be jumping over rocks and joining other streams, then rivers, until you finally reach the mighty Mississippi and on to the sea. Enjoy the ride!" I found it to be a fitting image for Luis and his passage to the great beyond. Like the innocent rainfall that soaks into the ground and makes its way into the dark channels of underground rivers, Luis had once possessed the innocent light of a charmed and beloved life. Then trauma took it away, so that he had to travel through life, as scripture says we all do, "seeing through a dark glass." Luis never lost faith in the light, though, and it certainly shone through, even through the shadows cast by past injuries. I say by our spring and imagined that his entrance into the next world was like emerging out of a darkened aquifer into full sunlight. "Welcome to that light, my friend! You're in for a great adventure! Ever blessing, ever blest, may you forever flow from the wellspring of the joy of living and find your way to the ocean depth of happy rest. Enjoy the ride."

photo by Lisa Nalven. Check out her beautiful gallery of Cuba photos at https://lisanalven.com/cuba/