To Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge, no matter where we go together

there is always a great national myth bearing down.

The one I come from claims three thousand years

of history. The government funds artists to prove this.

It’s why there’s an official stamp on Carlos Fuentes’s

first novel, and an applause for Octavio Paz standing

at Tlatelolco in 1969 saying over and over,

it wasn’t a triumph, it wasn’t a defeat.

But it was a massacre, and it was a defeat.

Rumor has it Castro stayed up for

a whole night writing his speech to the artists.

He wanted them to make him promises they

could not keep. Telling yourself one thing,

and then doing another. Ni triunfo, ni derrota.

After leaving Cuba, and then New York, Zilia Sánchez

moved to Costa Rica and lived there until the end

of her life. It’s as close as I can get to Cuba, she said.

The ocean is never in my work, you can never see it,

but it lives in me, it’s the source of everything.

There is a video of her from 2000 throwing one

of her paintings into the ocean. She had to lean

down and grasp the wide canvas with both arms

to try and get it past the break. She waded

in up to her knees to push it farther into

the swell, every time it swung back to her.

I wanted her to swim, and to leave, she said,

I wanted to see her agony, as if she were a person.