By Isabel Gonzalez

HAVANA TIMES – I’m 15 years old, and I was born surrounded by trees and damp earth. I live amid the silence of the countryside, which sometimes heals but at other times weighs heavily. I write because it’s the only way I know to organize the thoughts that never stop swirling around in my head.

Through my writing, I will try to explain for Havana Times readers the Cuba I experience, to sketch with words those everyday scenes that my drawings cannot capture. I will share with my readers the perspective of “those of us who are staying behind” and the feelings of nostalgia that I can only heal through art.

Perhaps you won’t find grand speeches or in-depth political analysis in my writing. What I offer are small stories seen through the eyes of a teenager who loves manga and video games, who escapes the silence of the days by listening to music, and who loses herself in the pages of a book.

Stories about those who leave and those of us who stay, about pencil sketches, crafts made during hours of solitude, small glimpses of a Cuba that grows old in the wood of my school desk, in the golden glow of a lamp on nights of blackouts.

I hope you find in my words a refuge, a fragment of poetry, or the certainty that even across the distance, we will always have art as a way to find one another.

Read more from the diary of Isabel Gonzalez here at Havana Times.