Life Chnges

In December of 1998, candidate Hugo Chavez Frias won the Venezuelan presidential campaign among a fearful environment in which nobody seemed to fit. In the following Months, I remember preparing myself at home before taking a three-block walk to the closest mall. I had to remove my watch, my white gold bracelet, and even take my wallet from my rear blue jeans’ pocket. Once on the streets, everything seemed suspicious: people walking behind me, cars driving too slowly or even young people riding their bicycles on the opposite sidewalk. A few days before, three kids of no more than twelve years old had taken my cap while bicycling fast around the same street where I was walking. There was nothing I could do. When I realized what had taken place, the kids were too far gone. Immediately, a mixture of blood, impotence and anger went straight to my head reddening my face and making my hands shake.

While walking to the mall, I remember that something hit me right between the eyes. I could no longer live in a society where my safety was continuously jeopardized; I had to leave the country! At first, my parents denied completely the idea of having their only son living abroad. They argued I hadn’t even finished high school, and we were doing extremely well as Cuban emigrants in their sixth year of exile. Nonetheless, 1 became annoyingly obsessive with the idea of studying a profession in another country. Every morning until the day I left, as my mother now recalls, instead of giving her the “good mornings” (for she was accustomed to waking me up every day before going to school)^ I used to tell her how eager 1 was to emigrate.

Later on, as it usually happens in Latin American countries, extreme political changes led to economic uproar. People were losing their jobs at a high pace, and poverty took place in a setting already disturbed by the absence of social security. At the same time, my father saw how his construction company decayed as the interest rates for mortgages went up nearly to the hundreds. Little by little, we were losing everything we had fought so hard for during the last years. Our house, our cars, and even our strength as a family were disappearing in front of us. Ultimately, my father would have no other choice