Photos Fabiana del Valle

By Fabiana del Valle

HAVANA TIMES – Dariel had his bags packed and his sights set on leaving Cuba when I met him. My mother warned me that starting a love story under those circumstances was doomed to failure. She was right, I admit, but I’ve never been one to play with someone else’s cards.

I like making my own decisions and charting my own course. If it ultimately leads me headfirst into a concrete wall, I accept the scar on my forehead with fortitude. After the blow, I dust myself off, get back on my feet, and keep going. It’s the only way I know to remain true to myself.

This time my mother was wrong. Dariel didn’t leave. Fate took several turns, and in the end he decided to stay with me. He unpacked his bags and placed his bets once again on this patch of land that had already taken so much from him.

If there is one thing Dariel is passionate about, it’s tropical fish. His lifelong dream was to have a shop, a place of his own where he could shelter, breed, and sell these creatures with their wet skin and vibrant colors.

He invested the entire budget he had set aside for his escape in making this dream a reality, and together, patiently, we began building the business. At first, there were only eleven fish tanks arranged in the tiny living room of the house where we lived at the time.

But four and a half years of constant work, collective effort, and sleepless nights allowed us to move into a larger home. We managed to transform that modest space into an business with more than forty fish tanks. Our living room became a sanctuary filled with light, aerators, and hundreds of lives swimming as they waited for another home.

Dariel learned to work with glass and built fish tanks of different sizes and shapes. He ventured into natural planted aquariums and even became a finalist in a national planted-aquarium competition.

For a while, everything was going well. At least we were able to survive from day to day, and that is more than many people in this country can say. The problem is that here, all dreams eventually come to an end because reality wears them down.

In the area where we live, the drinking water supply had never failed until one day it began to dwindle, eventually drying up altogether. For example, over the past six months, we have received water through the pipes only five times, and never with enough pressure to fill our tanks.

Without a constant supply of electricity, the pumps couldn’t oxygenate the aquariums. We dealt with this problem through sheer muscle and persistence, changing the water frequently by hand. Our neighbor has a well in his yard and shared some water with us during those brief moments when the national power grid was working and we could turn on the pump.

Then one day, someone else’s negligence dealt us the final blow. Another neighbor decided to renovate his home and carelessly blocked the area’s sewage outlet. With the first heavy rains, the wastewater had nowhere to go and rose relentlessly until it seeped into the well.

It is impossible to describe exactly the horror I felt when I saw the water entering our tank—a thick, dark sludge with a foul smell. We cried. We cried because we understood that our one and only remaining chance of keeping the business alive had died.

Without clean water, there is no way for an aquarium to survive. We had no choice but to begin a desperate sell-off. We lowered our prices in an attempt to recover the money we had invested before the fish began to suffocate. Dariel contacted all his colleagues and offered unheard-of discounts, but no one around us had the money to buy everything.

Finally, when desperation seemed as though it might kill us, we found a buyer who took it all. We can at least take comfort in knowing that we saved those animals and recovered the money from our initial investment. The question now is: what do we do with that money?

If we use it for food and daily expenses, it won’t be long before we have nothing left. We have to reinvest it immediately in some other business, or the high cost of everyday life will gradually devour it.

It hurts to see the sweat, faith, and dedication of four and a half years reduced to a stack of devalued bills with which nothing new can be built. It hurts to walk through my own living room and see it empty and silent, where only days ago hundreds of lives made their home. It hurts to look through the gallery on my phone, where I have photos of every aquarium Dariel planted, and know for certain that he won’t be able to do it anymore.

Around Dariel, I remain silent. I don’t tell him what I’m thinking because I understand perfectly well how deeply it burns inside him. I watch him and admire him because, despite everything, he has not lost his desire to take on the world. He never gives up and is always looking for a way forward.

I can’t fool myself. We have reached the end of the labyrinth that is this Island, and there is no way out. It isn’t about being pessimistic. It is reality, as cold and devastating as it may seem. We live in a place where dreams and the hope for a better future have died.

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Read more from the diary of Fabiana del Valle aquí en Havana Times.