Belle Habs

Open Windows

1978

The scent of manure mixed with fresh-cut grass hit my nostrils, causing me to stir from my sleep. Then I felt its wet, coarse tongue caress my cheek. In my stupor, I tried to push it off me. As my eyes adjusted to the distant light coming from the window, I met its gaze. Those brown eyes on its large, round head, staring down at me from the open window, sparked a shriek I had not heard before. It pulled away from me but did not scare easily. It was determined to lick the remnants of the previous night’s meal from my face—or perhaps it connected with my three-year-old innocence. Regardless of what attracted it to my window on that muggy summer evening, it was not ready to depart.

The beast and I were attacked by the sudden light created by my parents as they rushed to my aid. Startled by the intrusion of adults, the cow knocked its head on the top of the window as it pulled its head out of my room. I had been licked by a cow while sleeping in my crib, which stood under an open window in our home in Camagüey, Cuba, where air conditioning was a luxury not afforded to counterrevolutionary ex-prisoners like my father. Had this been a dream, Freud would have had a field day, but this night has become the joke of many family gatherings.

My mother wiped my slimy face with a wet towel she retrieved from the bathroom. I don’t recall seeing my sister that evening. Only two years older, she normally would have been in that crib with me. I know this because my mother reminds me often how I used to push my sister out of this crib when we were infants. Perhaps she was sleeping in my parents’ room when this all occurred and was not stirred by the commotion. Or perhaps there are other reasons I do not recall her in many of my memories of Cuba.

My father rushed out of my room and out the front door to chase the cow before it escaped. A cow in Cuba in 1978 was a blessing, but also a crime to kill without government authorization. As he ran, I remember him muttering, though perhaps not quite in words I could fully understand then, something about not letting the only chance of meat escape. Perhaps it was divine intervention that the cow escaped my father's foot chase and slingshot pelts. He would have added another five years of prison to his already served seventeen years had he been caught killing this cow, which had escaped a nearby government-owned field and found its way to me. My family did not eat beef that week, or perhaps not even that entire year. It would be two more years with food scarcity and hunger before we would find ourselves in a new land we never imagined reaching.

1980

Our family was kicked out of Cuba in 1980, right before I turned five. This was the year Fidel Castro rid himself of those who threatened his very existence, while emptying Cuba’s prisons in the process. They say when God closes a door, He opens a window. Coming to America was that window for us, despite the early struggles to achieve sponsorship. If Jimmy Carter had not opened the doors for us to come to the US, I do not know if I would still be alive, living in an oppressive regime. The Cuban government frequently conducted arbitrary arrests of activists and dissidents and their relatives. 

The next window I would remember after that frightful night in Cuba would be the porthole window in the boat that brought us to America during the Mariel boatlift. I remember seeing water and sky for much of the 45-minute trip from Havana to Key West, during which I vomited profusely into a bag given to me by a kind lady who kept most of the children and mothers under deck, while men piled on the floor of the deck above, including my father.

I should remember the flight from Key West to Pennsylvania, but I don’t. I only remember what happened in the army barracks where we were kept for three months until my father’s friend found an incredibly generous New Jersey family to sponsor us. Our status in the United States was precariously temporary until we received sponsorship. Cubans who came after 1984 were given permanent residency without having a sponsor. We were not as lucky. 

Families in those army barracks were separated by blankets hung over a string. We slept in cots for those three months. One night, two women got into a fight, and one grabbed the gun of a nearby soldier. The bullet grazed my father’s ear and pierced the blanket behind him.  

  That was the first time I remember hearing the sound of a gun. I don’t know what happened to those women, I remember my mother holding us tight that night and the sound of her chest as she cried herself to sleep.

1987

I should have been flattered at the age of three by being selected as the cow’s object of affection, but all that night did for me was create a fear of open windows particularly those close to my bed. It would be years later, that a different intruder would try to enter through an open window near my bed while my mother, sister, and I napped on a Sunday afternoon. I would be older and stronger at that point, no longer helpless to a huge beast. That intruder was not aware of his fate when he entered through the fire escape in our New Jersey apartment. He barely escaped with his clothes on. He was attacked by a mother hen and her two chicks. 

2001

Years later, I, myself, would find humor in the memory of that frightful night in 1978 as I directed my 8th-grade students in a production of A Charlie Brown Christmas when Lucy gets kissed (licked) by Snoopy and begs for hot water, disinfectant, and iodine to wash away his germs.

I laugh at the parallels: a little Cuban girl once licked by a cow, exiled from her homeland, and rescued by a president who opened windows where others slam doors, directing a play about another little girl licked by another animal while trying to direct her own play with unruly actors. It makes me wonder, do we ever truly escape the unexpected moments that lick at our lives, leaving a mark? Or do they simply echo through time, reminding us of the humor in our shared narratives?

2025

Today, as I look out the bay window in my dining room with a view of the sun setting over a lush green East Asheville mountain, I wonder if I am destined to follow in my mother's footsteps and find myself in a new land, where I don't know the language or the culture. With the political climate in the US looking similar to Cuba's in 1958, I worry that history may repeat itself, especially since we choose not to learn from it. I hear the news about families being separated by deportations every day, and my heart breaks for their struggles. Being a citizen did not keep Castro from kicking my family out of Cuba, and we were all born there. I worry that I should carry my citizenship proof with me during these days of ICE raids, but will that be enough to keep me from being deported from the US, a place I was not born, nor feel welcomed these days, not just because of my race, but also because I am a lesbian married to another woman. 

What if the doors of opportunity slam shut for my family and countless others like us, while we are left clutching our own identity papers, wondering if they are enough to shield us from the uncertainties that lie ahead? What if the lands that promised refuge become another chapter of displacement, where communities built over the years crumble under fear and mistrust? These are not just personal fears; they echo within the hearts of many, as we all face the possibility of being uprooted once again. 

Will another government open its doors to us if this country closes its windows? The biggest irony is that I might end up in Spain, where my father's father and my mother's grandfather were born. Before Castro allowed the Mariel boatlifts to happen, my mother felt change brewing, and she had convinced my father to request a visa to visit his cousin in Spain. I often wonder what my life would have been like if we hadn't been forced to leave Cuba and been able to visit Spain with my parents. Would we have started a new life there with extended family? Like the cow that visited me at the age of three at night, despite my fear, I am not ready to part.