I’ve searched for dates, but the ones available leave me unconvinced, and in the end I’ve come to accept that we become exiles when we begin to disappear or turn into a vague reference in the memory of others. When in our town, or our country, those who once remembered us – our neighbours, teachers and enemies – can no longer conserve our presence among them.

I grew up in Cárdenas, a city of 150,000 inhabitants on the northern coast of Cuba, two hours by car from Havana. During my childhood in the 1990s, emigrants living in the US or Europe would return from time to time to visit their relatives for a few days, after years of absence marked by occasional letters and patchy, echoing phone calls. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba started to depend on remittances from our diaspora and tourist money from developed countries. To my mind, educated in the political rites of communism, those nostalgic people were seeking a defunct, probably fictional world, a town that had never existed, even though towns like mine don’t change very much, or perhaps not at all.

I was inclined to expropriate the absentees from their former lives. They may have known the street stories and old neighbourhood legends, the addresses and place names, but I saw nothing to convince me that they were really from Cárdenas. They seemed like foreigners disguised as Cardenenses. They had abandoned the habits of poverty. They did not suffer through blackouts or steal food for their children; they had not thrown themselves out into the sea on rustic boats to reach the Florida Keys. Nor did they watch the national TV news, or participate in revolutionary rallies or parades. Something rendered them blurry – probably the fact that people kept being born in their abandoned country. This was enough to begin to erase them.

It is five years since I was exiled. My own erasure must be underway. Though for a long time I resisted settling in the US, I now live in New York. If I’m ever able to return to Cárdenas, it will surely be as an intruder in my own town; another ambassador from a foreign society. While the government or the military banish you deliberately, ordinary people can do the same through indifference – a form of cruelty that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular because, in truth, nobody wills it.

People tend to assume that the challenge of exile lies in finding a sense of purpose in your displacement, in inventing something from nothing. But often it’s sadder and more concrete: accepting the meaning that others have assigned to your life.

There’s something anachronistic about becoming an exile from communism long after the fall of the socialist bloc. The Cold War ended, and even what came after it seems to be reaching its end. I can’t pretend I live in a world where the Soviet Union still exists. Yet much of the Cuban community in the US has decided to keep replicating this conservative fantasy, especially after the rise of Donald Trump. Miami’s anticommunist rhetoric found itself more at home in the MAGA movement than anywhere else since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cuban exiles once appeared to be history’s discarded scraps, but Trumpism has provided them with a vengeful ideology.

A few days ago I visited Mexico, a neutral place I had to go to see my mother. She can’t come to the US and I can’t go back to Cuba. When we said goodbye, I realised that I couldn’t fully understand the state of the country I was sending her back to. To the hunger, scarcity and blackouts, I now had to add the fuel blockade that Washington recently imposed on the island. It felt strange that none of this was happening directly to me.

I was 30 when I left Cuba definitively, an age when all the experiments and masks of youth begin to sediment, so the conventional question of adulthood – “Who will I be going forward, and probably forever?” – coincided and overlapped with other surprising and equally demanding questions: not just “Who will I be there, after communism?”, but also “Who will I be here, under capitalism?”

I think everyone who has been exiled was exiled before their exile began, just as everyone who’s been divorced was divorced before their divorce. “No exile is voluntary,” said the Argentine novelist Juan José Saer, who spent the last 40 years of his life in Paris. “When someone moves from one place to another, believing themselves to be freely making a decision, the reasons for the change have been plotted by the world long before the individual carries it out.” The country expels you before you leave it or are denied reentry – as soon as you break with the pact of civil obedience and take the path that blocks any reconciliation with power. This rupture distances you from everything else, and pulls you out of the order that any homeland provides, no matter how oppressive.

For me, this process probably began in 2016, when, along with several colleagues and university friends in Havana, I co-founded a magazine called El Estornudo (The Sneeze). We published articles that would never have appeared in the official propaganda organs: about the destitute inhabitants of the country’s biggest garbage dump; about the rise in femicides, and how the state hid or denied the statistics; the testimony of political prisoners who had spent decades behind bars; and stories about the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who escape by flying to Ecuador or Nicaragua and then crossing Central America and Mexico to reach the US.

We slowly became, without intending to, voices that had to be eliminated. Our expulsion from the city of legality brought us into contact with artists, curators, scientists and citizens who had also been harassed and cornered, creating something like a subversive ghetto. We experienced political protest as a kind of party. Despite the repression, or perhaps thanks to it, we had a good time disobeying: that is, we found a method and a purpose that made everything else seem boring.

In the summer of 2018, the Cuban government implemented Decree 349, requiring all artistic activity to receive prior governmental approval from the Ministry of Culture. But we carried on, organising alternative biennials, performances demanding the right to free expression, and solidarity campaigns for imprisoned activists and censored artists. The regime couldn’t figure out what to do with us. We were defamed, surveilled, arrested, detained and interrogated. The TV news depicted us as mercenaries. In 2020, a group of us barricaded ourselves in a house and went on hunger strike, seeking to free a rapper who had been unjustly sentenced to eight months in prison. The San Isidro Protest attracted public attention across the country and abroad. Consequently, many of us wound up in exile, and others (the poor and black ones) in jail.

I left Cuba on the night of 9 January 2021, suspecting or understanding that there was a real possibility I wouldn’t be allowed to return. A high official from the Ministry of the Interior guarded me all the way to the airport gate: he was the last person I saw in Havana, the last person I spoke to, the final image of my country.

For almost two years, I drifted between Miami and New York. On 20 November 2022, an American Airlines agent at Miami airport told me I couldn’t board flight 837 to Havana, according to information the airline had received from the Cuban immigration authorities. I remember the young man was thin, tall and attentive. He had no idea what was going on. Faking surprise, I asked him if he knew what accounted for my bad luck, and he said he didn’t. “It happens sometimes,” he added, “it could be an error on your passport, an administrative mistake. You should check and book another flight when you know for sure.” I recorded the conversation on my phone, but I’ve never played it back, because I don’t see the point.

Here, political prohibition had put on a technical mask and been explained away as an accident. It was tempting to believe in this bureaucrat’s cordial gestures and the rhetoric of his style guide. ‘Maybe it really is a misunderstanding,’ I thought, captive to the self-soothing logic we follow when a definitive event, which has already happened even before it happens, is finally consummated. ‘Is it really happening to me?’ I asked myself, but not in surprise, rather as a kind of confirmation. Even so, things became very strange, and acquired a different consistency. The world dropped away with a more emphatic weight, and I started to slide into an uncertain place, as if floating a few inches off the ground. At the same time, I became dense like ancient matter that had suddenly begun to fossilise.

If they had let me get on the flight, what would I have done in Cuba, where everything I knew had gone up in smoke? Did I go to the airport just to receive an answer I already suspected – an answer that, despite the initial impact, calmed me and took the weight of my resolution off my shoulders? If I returned, I couldn’t have done so as a tourist, or as someone led by longing or melancholy, because I had become a political dissident. Regardless of what the military regime did or didn’t have in mind for me, I couldn’t spoil my life’s moral narrative so easily by returning – not so consciously and with such vulgarity.

In the following weeks, I moved out of a friend’s apartment in north Manhattan and rented one with my partner in South Brooklyn. I started taking English classes, got a TV to watch NBA games, and acquired a chess set with a digital clock. I kept buying books, and organised a modest library in my new living room. Letters and bank offers began arriving in the building’s mailbox addressed to me. On the cusp of winter I finally realised that I lived, and enjoyed living, in New York.

Exile is not just the impossibility of returning somewhere, but also the obligation to remain somewhere else – and it grants you time to settle in. It warns you what’s about to happen, but it never reveals, or fully explains, what it is that you’ll have to get used to. You search for its rules, but can’t make sense of them, because exile, as I understand it, is the suspension of all rules, a state of disorder and disorientation, which then becomes wisdom and silence, and then dies. In Journey to the End of the Night, Céline writes: “That’s what exile, a foreign country is, inexorable perception of existence as it really is, during those long lucid hours, exceptional in the flux of human time, when the ways of the old country abandon you, but the new ways haven’t sufficiently stupefied you as yet.”

To be perfectly honest, my idea of exile is that it really doesn’t last long. For lack of a better name, I’ve come to think of what we usually call exile as ‘postexile’, because true exile produces such an extreme exaltation that no one who wants to survive can sustain it. It should be seen as a change of address, the period when you move – gradually, cautiously – into the new house that is now yourself. There’s a narrow window in which to decide, or at least propose, what type of exile you want to be – it closes when your new society codifies you. That assimilation of new laws marks the end of exile-as-process and the start of exile-as-character. The performance is inevitable, and doesn’t depend on you, but you get to decide what type of role you’re going to play.

After leaving Cuba, I often argued on social media about the political situation in my country, published op-eds about it in the international press (sometimes in The New York Times or Washington Post, but mainly in El País) and spoke at universities about my experience as a dissident. I joined marches and public protests against the Castroist regime in Washington, Miami and New York. During a baseball game between the Cuban and US national teams – which took place in Miami but was televised in Havana – I even ran onto the field with a flag to draw attention to political prisoners on the island.

None of these things might seem particularly dangerous, but in my case at least, they concealed a few perils. First, holding onto public attention out of vanity. Second, fetishising my own displacement, or bureaucratising my sense of loss. Third and most significant, self-harm. Political events live longer in speech than in fact, and the exile, who has just been singed, wants to keep burning himself on a now-extinguished bonfire, with a rhetoric that resists his new solitary condition, and which, now that it’s no longer part of a chorus, sounds like the vehemence of a madman. The messianic feeling that confronting a dictatorship stirs inside you won’t be satisfied by anything short of your own annihilation. You don’t want the fever of dissidence to go down.

In the end, we should understand the early stages of exile generously, as a kind of unconscious, self-imposed penance. If I didn’t adapt, no one would demand that I did. I was willing to keep talking about Cuba, and in fact I still am, because you cannot cast away your experience and culture. Yet the language of postexile can’t come from any national institution, and that’s what Cuban exile is.

In New York I slowly recovered many things, but I couldn’t manage to recover the main thing: language, and writing along with it. I was frequently called upon to comment on public events that I myself had contributed to. Dedicated to the emphatic tone of political activism, or the assertive and sometimes strident manner of the newspaper columnist, words began to fail me. The longer I tried to see things programmatically, to assign everything a practical aim, and to argue in the terms and tones that direct contact with a dictatorship imposes as much on its enemies as on its supporters, the less I understood what I was saying. There was a knot in my tongue. That living trauma, that permanent trace in your speech, drowns the little voice – always fragile, strange and ghostly – that is the source of literature.

Then, in the spring of 2024, after reading the excellent unpublished poems of a friend who lives in Mérida, I started writing poetry too, returning to a craft I had had to abandon at the age of 19 or 20, devastated by the evidence that I was incapable of imagining a single worthwhile verse. Years had passed, but the verdict remained unchanged. This time, in a frenzy, I wrote 20 poems that didn’t go anywhere. Still, they served a therapeutic purpose – the purpose of purposelessness. Here was the pleasure of a modest task that didn’t aim to accomplish anything, that didn’t shout in the public square or speak to anyone in particular.

Whatever their quality, I know these poems were genuine, because they gave me back my silence. The thing that had happened to me, the thing we call exile, was settling down. Whatever I said about Cuba in the future, it would come from the conscience of someone who no longer lived there.

Long before I became one myself, I had concluded that Joseph Brodsky was the twentieth century’s exemplary exile from communism: someone who declined to keep denouncing Soviet repression, or to wallow in his own suffering, because he didn’t want that vulgar regime to live through his words. In 1964, he was convicted of “parasitism” and sentenced to five years of forced labour on a farm in Archangelsk, in north-west Russia, near the White Sea, but thanks to pressure from various local and international intellectuals, he only spent 18 months there. In 1972 he managed to leave the Soviet Union with a book by John Donne in his luggage, and eventually, after meeting W. H. Auden in Austria, he found work as a professor in the US.

Misfortune barely dented his transcendental sensibility. “A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language,” he once said. Uninterested in his persecutors, he wrote about Venice, a city he had always belonged to, even before he had ever visited it.

Brodsky understood that the Western world bestows a special status on the victims of communism, or on victims of totalitarianism in general, for their ethnographic value. In the 1988 essay “The Condition We Call Exile”, he writes of the role of exiled writers: “Of course it has to do with the necessity of telling about oppression, and of course our condition should serve as a warning to any thinking man toying with the idea of an ideal society. That is our value for the free world. That is our function.” If it now seems unusual of Brodsky to strictly assign us a particular role, that is not because the one he gave us is unworthy or unimportant, but because it may be one of his few ideas that remain circumscribed by the political context of his life: the Cold War.

Anyone who has suffered and fled Stalinism should look out for signs of tyranny in their new adopted country – but in practice, or, better yet, in capitalism, that responsibility amounts to a distraction. If such an exile lets down their guard and agrees to be reduced to their misfortune, they can easily wind up fighting against a corpse. Like a Giovanni Drogo for our time, they will keep watch over a frontier that no one is going to cross anymore. If that, and only that, is their purpose in the free world, they will live as a dependent guest in their new surroundings, conceding any disagreement, anger or irritation as a tithe to the nationalism of their new home. Postexile will not be the continuation of a search, the desire to become a citizen, but its definitive end.

The Soviet Union disappeared, but the insurgent far right – illiberal democrats, neoliberal authoritarians, and techno-Christian fascists – constantly invokes it as an imminent danger to be fought. From an anonymous point within a totalitarian mass, communist exiles have now been transformed into an exotic relic in a display case. Forced to understand their new predicament through the obsolete power relations of the Cold War, they are blocked from entering the time of their postexile, which is the time after the “end of history”.

Everyone wants a permanent role for themselves in history, even at the price of turning drama into caricature, or the victim into a fool. This may explain why much of the Cuban exile community invokes communism wherever it goes, why they imagine that all political movements except the most obscenely right-wing threaten to turn the country sheltering them into another dictatorship. In recent years, they claimed that Andrés Manuel López Obrador would defy his term limit to hold onto presidential power in Mexico, and that Gabriel Boric and Gustavo Petro would do the same in Chile and Colombia. None of this happened. But when Nayib Bukele did it in El Salvador, they cheered him on. No other diaspora is as proudly Trumpian as mine.

It is as if we Cuban exiles secretly wish to carry over our suffering from the country we escaped into the land of the present. As if we wish to see that suffering recreated here, to not leave it behind. It’s a lazy desire, clearly, one that doesn’t want to go looking for history, but expects history to come calling. Rather than accept the disorientation of postexile, we prolong our victimhood. Trump’s tyrannical behaviour might even make our backwardness look cutting-edge. Maybe we’re not late to democracy, but early to authoritarianism.

To topple communism in Latin America – represented by the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan regimes – Washington has capitalised on the trauma of exiles from those countries, reactivating and updating the Monroe Doctrine, a nineteenth-century policy of plunder. Trumpism has no interest in establishing a democratic order in any of these countries, nor does it have the capacity to, since it can’t export what it disdains. The reactionary legislations of Cuban lawmakers in southern Florida, and even Marco Rubio’s last-gasp attempts to revive imperial foreign policy, cannot hide the fact that our diaspora has failed to process its suffering outside the sentimental frame of totalitarianism.

After the Cold War, anticommunism became a farce, which happens not only when history repeats itself, but also when it does not move on. Reality here imitates Orwell, at least in one way. Milan Kundera noted that 1984 reduced totalitarianism “to its political dimension alone” and this dimension “to what is exemplarily negative about it”, which is why he refuses “to forgive this reduction on the grounds that it was useful as propaganda in the struggle against totalitarian evil. For that evil is, precisely, the reduction of life to politics and of politics to propaganda. So despite its intentions, Orwell’s novel itself joins in the totalitarian spirit, the spirit of propaganda. It reduces (and teaches others to reduce) the life of a hated society to the simple listing of its crimes.”

The singularity of totalitarian ideology lies in the delicacy of its psychology, which is absent in Orwell. In this project of absolute power, the roles that each party plays, crucially, aren’t fixed. Belonging to the repressive apparatus won’t save you from the possibility of becoming a victim. On the contrary, every victim must recognise that they learned, if only through suffering, how repression is accomplished, that they know how to do it. To deny that sin – to imagine that totalitarianism now has nothing to do with you, or that the master’s ideology doesn’t live inside you – is to lose your freedom in postexile. It means accepting the definitive reduction of your life to its exemplarily negative side.

An exiled community or people cannot be asked to simply forget their oppressor or their oppression. That choice was available to Brodsky because he was, in the end, a liberal, a poet, and, if I may say so, a prince. As for me, I am none of those things, and since, no matter what I say or don’t say, Cuba’s reality is what it is, I’ve tried to search for a language that might allow me to name the tragedy that is underway there. At the same time, as a character now integrated into the masked theatre of postexile, I want to reject a specific role that Brodsky warned me about in advance.

As I understand it, this challenge isn’t related directly to what one writes about, and much less to technique or style, but to an overall disposition. That is, to a political perspective capable of heeding what Edward Said observed: that exile, in spite of its fragility, sustains a mirrored relationship with the nationalism it derives from. On the other hand, the writer will always have the option of remaining in “solidarity [yet] solitary”, as Édouard Glissant advised. Exile gives rise to distance, and creates an inner rupture so powerful that might, if not reduced to cynicism, become a kind of emotional intelligence – and here I speak of course of a public or collective emotion. Though the language I speak of is ultimately devised by the writer, it’s the citizen who organises the material that language works with.

Last year, I ended up in a situation that forced me to clarify how I position myself in my new political circumstances. It happened in the middle of a “No Kings” protest against Donald Trump in Manhattan last June. I spent so long staring at the hammer and sickle symbol on one organisation’s banner that someone from the group came over to me and asked if I’d like to join them. I said no. Then she asked me if I was a communist. “I can’t be,” I answered, “I’m Cuban.” Curiously, that was enough. Of course I didn’t tell her off or give her a sermon. But there was something in my face, an involuntary expression, that made her ashamed. Without my asking, she admitted that she understood the errors of Stalinism, and said that her organisation was on another path. She wanted to explain further, but I stopped her. She handed me a pamphlet, I thanked her, and we parted ways.

One of the funny things about young Western communists – or, at least, those I’ve come across – is that they always resemble either evangelical missionaries or rich kids playing with a grenade just to annoy their parents. They have plenty of recruiting zeal and powerful anticapitalist conviction, but a careless understanding of symbols. When they approach someone, they seem to know that they’re pestering, or that they have an enormous task cut out for them. It’s Herculean work to say something in just a few seconds that will make the listener forget the historic evidence of millions of victims and deaths. The Gulag still weighs heavier than any adolescent enthusiasm.

At the march, as I searched for a place where I could belong, I found the Palestinian flag: not simply because I shared a sense of horror at the perpetual slaughter of the Gazans, but also from the certainty that, in an age of partial recognitions and struggles fragmented to the point of neurosis, the genocide had allowed a global rage to speak itself. Gaza had become a mirror that reflected the definitive moral fall of bien-pensant liberalism, but it also forced everyone else to see themselves there, and the image made clear the uselessness of any exclusively identitarian narrative – as well as the complicity of those narratives with capital’s war machinery and the technocratic religion of progress.

Everything else included me only partially, or not at all. At one point I was frightened by my own repressed desire to participate again in a protest tailored to me, or to a maimed, uniform collective. Here lies the complexity of a totalitarian education, in its materiality, in a metaphysics that sometimes seems cast in steel. Cuban parades always followed an invariable logic: everyone loved or pretended to love the Great Leader, the slogans never changed, the goal was always the same. All you had to do was celebrate; there was no need to reckon with difference or the discomfort it brings.

When I took part in political events as a young Pioneer in Cárdenas, the unanimity around me provided a kind of maternal warmth. I was protected, in a way that I never would be again, inside that false perfection. The problem with communism is that you need to grow up, and communism detests and punishes that biological defect – that ambition of the body and the spirit. What pulled me toward the hammer and sickle banner wasn’t indignation or rage, but the surprise of seeing that long-familiar icon amid a sea of images and expressions. As always, that attraction gave way to anguish. It was awful to realise that such a terrible symbol is embedded inside me, though ultimately everyone finds their own logo of evil somewhere out there.

In Yukio Mishima’s novel Thirst for Love, the narrator proposes an allegory about a lion who escapes from captivity. After his escape, the lion knows a world wider than that of a lion who has only known the jungle. The image, as I’m using it, is so didactic it verges on caricature, but it’s also true: communism as a cage, capitalism as a jungle. Mishima then adds an extraordinary nuance, which is not usually included in discussions about what we call freedom: “A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated.” It’s this bracing feeling of negation that, without relativising the liberation he’s attained, makes the lion unsatisfied. While there were once only two worlds for him, inside the cage and outside the cage, now, Mishima says, the lion knows that there’s no third world “that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage”.

Still, wherever you wind up in adulthood, you carry your memory like a handbag in the middle of a crowd – afraid of losing it, or that someone might snatch it. I don’t know if I would have learned this if I hadn’t been exiled; probably not. It’s probably one of the things I learned only and exclusively thanks to exile, and not as a simple result of having lived, of letting time pass over me, here or there, anywhere.