“An Instant Hero”: A Short Fiction for Cuba

An Instant Hero: A Short Fiction for Cuba

“Roberto!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. Their 5-year-old son Tico cried uncontrollably holding on to her Calvin Klein jeans. She must have screamed his name so loud that big black birds perched on roof tops flew away.

The man ran toward the crowd of chanting Cubans that had gathered dozens strong at the intersection. “Libertad, Libertad! Patria y Vida!” they chanted, and their voices were strong but muffled by their face masks. When Roberto reached them, they were already beginning to sit down on the broken pavement of the Havana street.

“We are going to sit here, and they are not going to move us, you all hear me?” their leader said. He was a slim bald young man. “Even if they cut us up into little pieces, you all hear me?”

Libertad, freedom, the wave rose and the sound of it made the old pre-1950’s buildings shake with excitement, the excitement of the new era that was being born that day. Roberto’s heart was racing; this was the moment he and his neighbors had been waiting for, and no one knew who had gotten it started, but it was here now. Then Roberto realized something as he looked around to the other rebels sitting down, men, and women, young and old. Every single one of them was wearing a mask, a mask that muffled their chants for freedom, a mask that was still the symbol of oppression everywhere in the world.

He began to stand up, slowly, and his slinky figure stood out and up. They were looking at him now; was he going to back down and run home, run home to his misery?

No, he was not. With his right hand he unhooked the mask from the left ear and brought it slowly to the right, revealing dry lips and broken teeth no one had seen for almost a year. Roberto took the mask, crumpled it, and threw it up in the air. The mask seemed to fly, never to come down again. Then the crowd roared and taking their masks off, threw them up to the heavens.

The revolution had begun.