Intimate worlds. To live in Cuba and not become a grey being, you have to learn that fear does not paralyse you.

I squeeze the passage in the streets of Havana.I don't see it but I know he's there.Stumbling block.I have to pay attention.If I fall it will be worse.Raising is more difficult than holding a firm, constant step.I look again.I see it hidden behind a column.Fear was always stepping on my heels until I turned 35.I stopped.I waited for him and I scare that he took fear: he is not used to people.And I told him - to that fear that I faced and to all the men who promote it - "I am not leaving this country" and he ran.Then he fell behind him and wherever he hides he ends up finding him.

Everything had its costs.I stopped being the theater editor at the Cuban Letters Editorial and began writing politics in Diario de Cuba, a newspaper made by Cuban exile in Madrid.And with the new step the interrogations came, the harassment, the police places but I realized that fear feared me more than me like when I was 13 years old and a madman in love with me chased me with a Majá (Culebra) tangled in my arms to intimidate me.

I had the same feeling.After having run ten blocks, I stopped, I extended his hand and slightly pressed the head of the Majá and in an instant she already seemed a snake charming expert.The madman never harassed me again.

At 35 I began to narrate the Cuban dystopia, but I had already faced it before.Today they have been in power for 63 years, governing.

The first time I faced it conscientiously was a teenager and started at home.We were as poor as the rest of the Cubans in 1994. My mother and I became women together.She was in charge of putting a plate of food on the table and I of my other basic needs.I was supposed to be part of her obligations but one afternoon I will exonerate her and we were so forever.

My aunt had given me a gold alliance that I had inherited I don't know who.I left for the street to sell it.A feat for a girl who only knew how to read, write and laugh.

One of the Jimaguas (as the twins are told in Cuba) sponsored me.A famous guy in his area for his handsome and the years in prison that he had "pulled."

"Nothing happens to him," said the newly self -styled godfather to another stranger who led me to travel the city.I followed the only recommendation he gave me: "Don't release the ring until you have the money in my hand."

I bought what I needed to start school.It would be three years in a student scholarship where we pay free studies with work in the middle -day field.In the morning I would complete secondary education and in the afternoon to reap popes more than 49 kilometers from my house.I would see my family every eleven days for three years.

With ten dollars of the Gold Alliance, flip flops came out, a backpack, a towel, deodorant, soaps, toothpaste. This was the inflation of those years. Each American dollar cost 120 Cuban pesos. I was fulfilling my 15 and half of my friends fantasized with the photos and parties that would present them in society. I was halfway among which his parents had achieved work in tourism and the photos could be paid for luxurious houses and those that were not. Among those that had not had to sacrifice the savings for the party of the 15 and those that did have to take that money and buy food. The other half of my friends prostituted himself. I did anything but offer myself. For them the easiest way to run away from the house was to look for a tourist to pay clothes, food and trips. Dreaming of a blue prince who was usually fat, old and came to buy, not to love. In the 90s of the twentieth century, girls and women become part of GDP. One more item of the national economy. Everybody knew. No one denounced. The "revolution" was sustained with our bodies.

That gold alliance was an investment.My aunt told me: “Don't sell it.The garments are not sold, ”but what was served to have gold on a finger and not being able to flee away from horror.She was not willing to make another man touch me without my consent.There were years of my childhood that I could not decide on my body.He didn't have control over who looked at him, who looked at him.My aunt's gift bought me keys for a fence of the many that I had to open to achieve some freedom.

I remember those years as if I had to cross the Serengeti.The fear had a hyena face, laughed like hyena, fed like hyena, looked at me like hyena.

At 23 it seemed to have defeated some battle.I realized that they had only been a few fights.I had to look at fear again.This time I had an official's face."You have been reckless, and we will not allow you," said the deputy director of the school where she had to work while moving my head as the guitarist of some rock group, but without the instrument;The only sound was her scolding.

I was no longer. They promised to make me a public trial in front of everyone. After the analysis with the bosses came the sentences. I touched me three because with one it was not enough. To me, the insumisa, the worst of all, who read books outside the class plan, had to bend it. First sanction. They would discount me the fifteen days of absence of the salary of that month. Second sanction. They would admonish me before my co -workers. Third sanction. They would convene after lunch schedule to the professors of teachers and more than six hundred teenagers so that the director of the school, from a scenario built to speak to a crowd, exposed them what my fault had been. I had to regret voice in the neck, cry ashamed while the others murmured. Part of the show consisted (I had seen him do when he studied at the university) in which some general secretary of the youth or the Communist Party took that time to raise his voice and remember the occasional lack of mine. I'm not exaggerating. I was sentenced to a tropicalized stalinist faith. If you commit what they consider an error, they can do this type of public escarnio. In those cases, only stones or eggs that use the stateless, worms, counterrevolutionaries are missing. Before or after shame, a friend will pose your hand on your shoulders and try to minimize the consequences. I was no longer.

My recent graduate crime had been to work during my vacation at the International Book Fair of Havana.Teachers should know how to teach.Teachers cannot write, do journalism or imagine novels.I thought about making a performance.Deliver in the Ministry of Education my Certificate of Bachelor Crushed within an envelope addressed to the Minister."Waxed and hand -cut paper, less lump," was going to be the title of the work.I did not perform the performance.There was my mother who over the years had become a woman different from me.She prefers to endure the blow to give it.Waiting for life to charge those who raise your hand.I prefer to return it and if later the life wants to take the problem for itself, thank you.

When my scenic narration teacher learned what he had done looked at me with a sneer."How beautiful you are", but she was not referring to my imagined performatic gesture because I never did it but the daring to flee the role that the system had assigned to me as a teacher.She couldn't aspire to more than she had studied.There would always be a constellation of officials between my dreams and I prevent me from realizing them.

Then a new fear began to look at the edge of things.He looked out for the corners of my laptop since the first interview I did talking about racism in Cuba because the editor said and insisted that in Cuba there was no racism, that if I said it and she published it it would be to give arguments to the enemy, it would be to attack the revolutionAnd I would see some consequence.Fear also took a man in the form of my life and then writing a report where connections between my friends and my secrets were established, and then using them against me.

I don't have an HGW XX/7 -style agent as in "The life of others" wiring my apartment because I don't have a attic.The surveillance is established by the same neighbors who are becoming as gray as the juanes, pedos or Alejandros, boring pseudonyms of the State Security agents, who are embodied with the dirt of the walls, with the collapsed buildings, the garbage piled up inThe corners.

My reality exceeded the rebellion on the farm and 1984. Orwell did not surprise me.From my 35, fear began to be called totalitarianism on an island without law where there is only power.He stopped being the man of the bag or my alcoholic uncle with a machete in his hand threatening to cut my grandmother and me in pieces, and became omnipresent and sometimes surrounds the house of police and does not let me out either to me or myBride so the Inter -American Commission on Human Rights has had to give us a precautionary measure to see if it manages to scare it from our door.

But none of that you perceive it until you stop the march and tune in with the misery with which Cuba have built in the last 63 years.Everything is thought so that you are as gray as the juanes, the pedos or Alejandro that harass and be embodied with hungWithout vitamins or pills to soothe the tremors of the hands.

It is easier than it was.To be an independent journalist woman in Cuba you have to learn to be a background broker.Light walk - not with the jewelry legs or crouched as I spent a good part of my life - and a high ability to store sugars so as not to bitter, hate only what is necessary, know how to discern when to tighten the step and when to get carried away by inertia.You cannot always be the protagonist, sometimes we have to support others who go in front of one with enough energy to face fear.

Facing fear cost me to live with my nightmares.They never manage to banish.They come and go like the waves.The damn circumstances of living on an island sneaks into dreams and defines everything.

The first nightmares came with steps on the stairs, touched on the door and hands that torn me from the bed.Luckily they only happened in my head.Others lived them.They have not yet materialized, perhaps because since the last time I hunt him to fear, I have tied him to a leg of the bed, he vigly watched him as he did to me.

I barely threaten me a tweet, I denounce it on the networks, I call my friends.They are the only weapons I have.No business with fear.I try not to have any complicity even if I see me undress, make love.The other day she looked me in the eye.In recent times it has been emboldened.Too many people imprisoned to say what they think.There are kids.Men and women who went out to scream to the street.People who are transported in hermetized cars, tied of feet and hands.Fear in fear of a cry seems more vulnerable but behaves as a wounded fierce, gives a skis and sinister, and can kill in a desperate attempt to keep power.Thus we have lived the last months.The president giving the order to shoot against unarmed people and I can stop doing journalism at account and risk that one day some hands will start my bed and my nightmares come true .-----------------------------------------------------------

María Matienzo Puerto.She writers that survives thanks to the journalism she makes of her because, although she enjoys her, her political activism only dislikes.In her life there is a before and after opposing the Cuban dictatorship.In the before she published in national magazines and anthologies.With the after she is a journalist from Cubanet News, a newspaper made in exile and has collaborated with media from the rest of the world.The publication of the report of reports "Apocalypse Havana (America are coming)" was a scandal in Havana.She has written the novels "Elizabeth still plays dolls" and "Castro Hermanos Orchestra: La Escoolita".She today lives in Cuba with her girlfriend but she does not know where she will live because she aspires to travel the world before it ends.