I’d arrived in Havana the night before after a very long flight, and I went outside early that morning. I walked down Avenida 26 in Vedado, crossed Línea and joined the Malecón near the Chorrera Fortress. A soft cloud of sadness had come down over me in the early hours. I couldn’t understand why; I hadn’t done anything to justify that feeling.

I’d come back to my city to have some fun, which is about the only reason why I ever return to Cuba. Although that’s probably what it was all about. In order to ‘just have fun’, you have to look for places that don’t feature on maps of fond memories, and travel to cities you aren’t too attached to. Unease, followed by feelings like this, assailing you without any encouragement, are clear signs that you belong to a place and owe it a sentimental tithe.

Sadness is a beast which charges at night and that morning I thought that I could throw it into some corner of the city, like someone irresponsibly abandoning a pet for someone else to take, or for nobody to take, leaving it to wander around until it is killed by the rain and heat and hunger, filling the air with that truncated smell of orphanage and saltpetre and old bodies. Havana is rather like that, if you know it well. It’s a city full of untethered sadnesses.

The Malecón was curiously wet at that hour. The ocean seemed to have spilled over at dawn, but it was the middle of April and the springtime sea in the Caribbean is always calm, a restful sea, a sleeping beast remaining within its confines, just like the sea in front of me now, in fact. At that point, I was still less aware of the intrigue in which the city was entwining me, against my interests and my will.

There were several details which may have appeared negligible, but which hinted at turmoil. Suddenly, I could easily have been that man who returns home after a weekend away and immediately senses that someone has been snooping around his property while he was gone. Someone who didn’t steal anything, didn’t break any glass, didn’t take down any paintings or scratch any walls. There was nothing hugely out of place in the house, but you could feel the breath left behind by some presence, and several portraits, chairs and ornaments were in a slightly different position.

I began to walk in search of an opening in the fog. ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,’ says Cohen. It wasn’t something I’d ever done when I lived in the city. Perhaps because heat doubles distances and one kilometre becomes two beneath the Havana sky. Like everyone else, I used to spend a lot of time in bus stops. Later, rather older and with ten pesos in my pocket, I’d hunt down the American collective taxis until their absence became almost insulting. It was a tough struggle.

Located at sea level, Havana is a reasonably sized city for the sequence of human life; a bipedal rhythm and cadence are still possible there. But I never used to take advantage of that fact, and nobody ever told me, because nobody ever knew, that that was what I should do. Walk, in any way possible. Walk, even when hungry or tired.

We spent hours waiting for something to save us, a bus or a disaster, it was all the same. We allowed the lethargy of the late afternoon to chew on us beneath a cement hut on some corner of the city, in Cerro or Marianao, and we ruminated on our frustration without doing anything about it, allowing our skin to grow sour and our flesh to turn bitter, the fleshy heart of innocence.

We wanted someone to move us forward and we believed we were travelling from one place to another, but in fact, after waiting for so long, all we could do was reach a place we had already come from. Home, school and work were all the same. There’s a time in Cuba when everywhere becomes the same place, where you can move neither forwards nor backwards, trapped in stillness.

And yet, if you walk, it takes longer but you age less. We residents of Havana should have taken notice of the rage that filled us when no bus came for us, and when the buses that passed by were already full. We should have harnessed that rage and ridden it ourselves, transporting ourselves wherever we wanted to go on its rump. Waiting without purpose is an acid which melts the plastic of youth.

I walked along the Malecón, carefully stepping on the damp, slippery moss on the wall. The early morning sun had an eerie effect on things, making them appear prematurely born. They were blurry, as if forcefully snatched from night’s nest.

Riding the national rage of exodus, I had left Cuba almost four years earlier and Havana had shrunk every time I returned. More and more, it seemed like a village to me, so docile, so insignificant. I now had an apartment in Mexico City, the mother of all outsized cities, and my perspective had changed. My senses, already elastic, were more permissive, and my idea of proximity now encompassed an infinitely higher number of kilometres. The mainland shows you that on an island, no matter how big it is, there is nothing that isn’t nearby.

Yet the very first time I arrived in Havana, I also began to walk, but I walked because it seemed immense to me; as big as only the city of your dreams can be. It was that place that simmers in your mind for years over the flame of your imagination, that place your mind has escaped to while it waits for your body to arrive so that they can explode together once and for all.

I’d just started university after a life trapped in the provinces, and I walked the main streets following the commotion. I was too afraid to enter the city’s transport network. I felt out of place, unable to understand the internal codes, the traffic signs, the usual routes and shortcuts. So I walked.

That Havana, immense Havana, was the product of survival and scarcity. And this village-like one now was the same. I visited the city to immerse myself in its nights, packed with intense, giddy parties. Seductive parties, with a supreme self-confidence. During the day, Cuba remains communist. It is linear, exhausting, it sweats, it squeezes you, and even people with money find it difficult to get used to. But the night is more and more neoliberal, although it too squeezes you and makes you sweat.

In a sense, day represents the past and night foreshadows the future, the eagerness for an escape without needless effort, a gap through which to slip without fleeing. The country moves between these two impossible times, with nothing appearing to happen in its real time. All of the latest news, for example, about hunger or the scarcity of products in Cuban shops, has already happened.

The night teems with medium-sized private businesses built on a conservative ideology, which are now permitted in the city. They are the moles on the skin of this state capitalism, emerging like a decaffeinated advance party onto the landscape of national Stalinism, and revealing the colour of the only other skin that could lie beneath this rubble.

With their demonstrated success, it is these spaces that most effectively embody the idea that politics is a dull matter to be handled by the Castro regime and the Miami exiles, something no longer required for a good life. Clubs, cultural and recreational centres, art galleries, and disused workshops and warehouses have been transformed into cocktail bars and exhibition venues of different kinds.

The advertising used by these companies sells a series of things which are desired by and apparently accessible to everyone, if we bypass the crux of the system and the social relationships it establishes. This is not dissimilar to what Mark Fisher termed ‘the semiotic excrescences [which] despoil former public spaces’.

Lust has a touch of the clandestine about it, and there is something intrinsically illegal, or perhaps immoral, in these parties in Havana, if we can indeed describe parties in such terms. This immorality or illegality may be explained by the vacuum-packed nature of the festivities, like a graft whose presence disfigures the face of reality. It does not mask it, as parties usually do, but instead erases it completely.

I enjoyed them so much for that very reason. They offered an escape, owing nothing to anyone.

The sadness I felt that morning of my last return must, then, have been a very political sadness. The blue sea lapping at Havana was unreal, hurting my eyes, and beneath the weight of the day, as I walked along the Malecón, I felt that the sadness was becoming thinner and transforming into awareness. Yet the colour of the sea continued to cry out and suddenly everything took on a secret harmony, of word, colour and idea, because sadness eventually disintegrates into melancholy, and I recalled the verses by Jorge Eduardo Eielson describing melancholy as ‘that ancient violet disease’.

In front of me was the F3 student residence, a 24-floor block where I spent my five years at university, from 2008 to 2013. I immediately knew I was on the other side. I had money in my pocket and I was no longer looking from the building, but instead being watched.

My memories of those years remain extremely vivid. There, the parties lasted until an hour which was never the same and which we could never have specified. There was strong alcohol and a collective sense of fun and casual sex and music and other ephemeral things which were bound to happen to us, if we sought to be truly deserving of the city’s grubby offerings. At that time, Havana was very much shaped by geography and bodies and skin.

Our revelries were rather austere, organised and carried out with few resources. That may explain why we, the students of the residence, knew that our improvised, nocturnal parties, with drinks distilled in handcrafted devices, were not the forgettable parties we were meant to be having, for the sake of our health.

In the end, people go to parties not only to escape the past or to relax in preparation for the future, but to avoid establishing excessively strong ties to the real time in which the festivities are situated. Essentially, you go to a party with the aim of forgetting it. But a rather unpleasant presence regularly hung over the parties at the residence; recognition, as the event unfolded, of the cyst of memory.

We students appeared to have fully grasped that rather than parties, these were rituals, and on one of those occasions I woke up on the balcony of my apartment. The waves were breaking against the wall of the Malecón, before being dispersed by the wind. The clocks displayed the time I expected them to display, and the programmes which were meant to begin on the television were beginning. There were no ships on the horizon.

The timid morning light began to flash, like a mirrorball at a huge disco or a lamp with a faulty connection. I saw two or three insignificant dots. Not stars, more like seeds, holes or tiny tears, as if the fabric of the sky hadn’t been used for a long time and the ravages of time had only been discovered once it had been taken out of storage.

That was how they were, those wonderful short days in December and January, which always marked the beginning of winter in Havana. A season which never developed further, never fully unfurled. You had to be very attentive to be able to witness a spectacle like that. The rough grey sea, whose surface moved like the canvas hidden beneath it, barely resisted the thrust of a thousand bodies swollen by the water, desperate to pounce on their former city like never before.

That’s what I learned back then and now seemed willing to forget. That feeling of helplessness and love, perhaps the only thing it is right and necessary and strangely enchanting to repeat.

*Translated by Eleanor Staniforth / Kennistranslations