Urged to flee
I decided to leave Havana in April 2020. By then, nearly all of my friends had left the country in a slow trickle over the previous few years. From a very young age I’ve lived far from my family, with relatives scattered throughout different cities in Cuba and beyond. Hence, along with the global paralysis of COVID-19 and the sudden interruption of my nomadic life came a terrible discovery: the absence of a returning point. The house I had lived in since adolescence, the city where I experienced my sentimental education, had been emptied of familiar faces and livelihood opportunities. Havana was revealed as a hostile, incomprehensible, and uninhabitable territory. Faced with the impossibility of a future, everything urged me to flee.
Suddenly, I felt a kind of disturbance, a vertigo before the march into the unknown. What happens when your body becomes the only homeland? But above all, how do you build a home in a strange territory? The decision to leave arrived in the midst of a pandemic that had brought humanity to a standstill. While the world remained suspended in a paralysis of any transit, I was determining my definitive move. I spent this waiting period organizing the details of my departure, locked up in an apartment that I had barely lived in for years.
Without money to return, the vertigo of migration produces a deep daze, an adventure into the unknown transformed into alienation in the face of the incomprehensible.
After a few weeks, the media began to publish the lives of migrants stranded by the crisis. Of all the stories I read, I was deeply moved by one report. The text narrated the resistance of Cubans in Moscow. Undocumented, some of them ill, they were stranded in a city, a climate, and a culture at the antipodes of the Caribbean.
A destiny deferred
They were chasing the promise of the "Russian dream". Without the need for visas, every year more than 25,000 Cubans landed as unwary tourists at Moscow or St. Petersburg airports. Some arrive to buy cheap and scarce goods, which they then resell at higher prices in Cuba. Others, with the illusion that once on land, they can take a train to Madrid. Many of them travel with equally illusory promises of work contracts, buoyed by optimism with the thought of landing in the former Soviet empire.
None of them could imagine that they were departing for a country where the cultural, climatic, and linguistic distance—to say nothing of the unfavourable immigration laws—make integration extremely difficult. Further, the deeply patriarchal culture and homophobic laws are an added obstacle for queer people. The worst was the discovery of an intricate shield—a neo-Iron Curtain—that encases the European borders.
I have said goodbye to all my friends during the last ten years, including part of my family. This dispersion of affections halfway around the world has produced an ever tense and fragile relationship with permanence and the notion of home.
Without money to return, the vertigo of migration produces a deep daze, an adventure into the unknown transformed into alienation in the face of the incomprehensible. Fragile and effectively trapped in Russia, thousands of these Cubans are routinely exploited for the profit of a ruthless labour network.
Simulated migration
With thousands of kilometers separating us I felt a deep desire to travel to Moscow, in order to know how these young Cubans confronted this violence, how they managed to maintain the search for a destiny denied to them everywhere. Initially, I only had an internet connection and many, many hours of pandemic-occasioned confinement.
Over many long video calls throughout 2020, I came to understand the feelings of awe and introspection one experiences as they inhabit a new territory. And I laughed. The picaresque nature of the stories added a tragicomic flavor to the situations. Encounters between Cuban identity and the Slavic world produced some memorable scenes, in which I never knew whether to cry or have a very long laugh.
Through these calls I experienced a sort of migration simulation. Right before travelling myself, however, I was offered a job at the school where I studied film. I suspended my plans to leave the country.
The obstacles and shared experiences were transformed into the cinematographic form of the film: the rental of a small apartment which became our refuge, our simulacrum of that desired, inaccessible home.
The worsening economic crisis in Cuba, and the strong government repression that followed nationwide demonstrations in July 2021, unleashed a massive exodus of Cubans, mainly young people. I know the many frustrations of my generation fleeing the country in an unstoppable stampede. I have said goodbye to all my friends during the last ten years, including part of my family. This dispersion of affections halfway around the world has produced an ever tense and fragile relationship with permanence and the notion of home.
Each simple act an adventure
After several flight cancellations due to COVID-19 health controls, in December 2021 I finally managed to land in Moscow. Two months of research awaited me throughout a gigantic and overwhelming city. Upon its conclusion, the cinematographer, Maria Grazia Goya, and the producer, Daniel Sánchez López, would arrive for a fifteen-day shoot.
Along with the many people I met who I had known in Cuba, soon Grindr, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram served as virtual public squares where I found numerous Cubans. Several ended up inviting me to their homes or to go out in a city, where simple acts like visiting a gay club or eating a hamburger at Burger King—just a few meters from Lenin's mausoleum—each became a fascinating adventure.
The act of filming soon encountered the same obstructions as the lives I wanted to portray: the panic of being stopped in the streets by the police, the fear of the coronavirus, the impossibility of taking a camera where people lived—illegal rental units with suspicious landlords, or a space with ten people lodged the same room. The obstacles and shared experiences were transformed into the cinematographic form of the film: the rental of a small apartment which became our refuge, our simulacrum of that desired, inaccessible home. In this shared space, the suspended weight of time spent waiting turned the future into an act of nostalgia and the present a gesture of resistance.
Eldis, Dariel, Daryl, and Juan Carlos, the protagonists of this film, soon became accomplices in our clandestine shooting. Their gestures and conversations represented the experiences lived and observed during the months of research in Moscow. The time spent waiting and the transitory, fragile nature of the space, transformed their minimal gestures and their peregrine conversations into an epic of minimal movements. Outside, not only the wind and snow enveloped the landscape with a certain hostility, but also the news of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine floated like a heavy blanket of tense calm over Moscow.
For those of us who inhabit the peripheries, the search for a home, for time, is an endless struggle.
The two weeks of shooting inside the apartment, then among the gigantic blocks of multi-family buildings in the suburbs, allowed this film to take shape. We always believed that each day of filming would be the last. A few days after finishing, Putin declared the invasion of Ukraine, and the airports were already announcing their first cancellations. We flew back to Havana, to Barcelona, to Berlin.
Misty and inaccessible territories
The eventual encounter with the images brought back from Moscow began to offer, little by little, some answers to the questions I’d begun asking a year and a half earlier. The phone calls continued with Eldis, Dariel, Daryl and Juan Carlos, who told me about their daily lives after our departure and the beginning of the invasion. For them, the idea of the future remained a misty and inaccessible territory: that feeling so well understood during the months of confinement in Havana at the beginning of 2020, recognized in the lives of so many people in Moscow, and shared by millions around the world.
I was able to discover then that every territory to be inhabited is an idea of the future. And the impossibility of imagining a future means the absence of a home.
And to reach the future we need memories, as well as a present where affection, love, and conspiracies with friends dwell.
Every home is made of time.
Time, that essential material of cinema.
For those of us who inhabit the peripheries, the search for a home, for time, is an endless struggle.
Luis Alejandro Yero
