Anduriña’s Syndrome

In the ’60s the Spanish duo of Juan and Junior popularized a song named “Anduriña”, that still can be heard today on some radio programs in Cuba and on pirated CDs, and also you can hear other versions now and again on television and in those nostalgic cabarets of the so-called “Prodigious Decade.” The theme is about a young girl called Anduriña, who escaped from her town, and in part of the lyrics of the song they make note that “she flew” and asked her to “turn quickly to port.”

The Revolution of 1959 brought us the flight of Cubans to everywhere; that is no longer news for hardly anyone, nor is the conjugal agreement that matches and prioritizes a great quantity of our young females with the goal of emigrating. So, many countries increase their populations with our compatriots, those who as Anduriñan emigrants escaped from their land to have a better life in freedom. It has been a long process for the Cuban people, and at highly elevated economic, political and social price. But the Cuban demographic scattered throughout the world can be a boomerang that helps to rebuild our country and reconcile our nation.

I hope that in the future nobody is forced to emigrate because they lost their rights and freedoms in their own country. Also, I hope and desire that some day our Anduriños can look towards their own country’s border with all the legal guarantees and “turn quickly to port” to help us rebuild the disaster that the pirates of the dictatorship have added to Cuba for more than a half century.

“My dead father you are in a photo (in many)”
and in many Springs
–in the living dead of the wide narrow place
and in the lives dying for inequality;
in the dream of liberty that never happens
and in the continuous denial of the visa of freedom.
In a long wish list of a country
and a lethargic prison country that hopes…”

Fragment of my poem ‘Dead Father’.

Translated by: BW

June 1 2011