Lo que la noche cuenta del día

Are there really two homelands, or are Cuba and the night, in fact, one and the same?

In Dos patrias tengo yo: Cuba y la noche, Reinaldo Arenas returns to José Martí’s two homelands. Cuba, once again; the night, too. He brings them together in the same abyss, only to end by waiting for another homeland. The poem appears in full on the floor and, at the same time, fragmented among the confetti. Words to be read and words to be thrown.

The audience participates. They pick up the confetti, throw it, gather it, and throw it again. There is something insistent about the celebration: each throw promises the intensity of the first, yet ends in the same way. What goes up falls. What seemed to begin, begins again.

Cuba, considered through this repetition. A history accompanied by promises of change, by the expectation that this time it will happen, that something will finally be different. Promises that are postponed, reformulated, spoken again. The waiting remains. The country does not. While people wait, it continues to collapse.