He knew he was an illiterate in the strange communist atmosphere. He took slow baby steps across the ideological surface, interested mainly in its effects on people – the small obsessions, the oblique explosions of silent desperation in their eyes.

Years before, when he was still pursuing a career as an artist, he had hated what he called “Cuban opportunism.” In his opinion the revolution and the U.S. embargo that followed were interesting issues that Cubans exploited as artists, issues that gave them an edge, and he considered the ease with which they could petition for political asylum an injustice, the networks they created to publicize and distribute their work when they managed to leave Cuba a mafia. But these inventions were really the product of his envy, since Havana was and still is the one and only New York of the Caribbean, the Paris of the Antilles, the New Delhi of the West Indies. Envy ate him alive: he envied their delicious eloquence, their Wifredo Lams and Gutiérrez Aleas, their Lecuonas and their Alejo Carpentiers. He even envied them their hunger and their suffering.

On some streets, after he had stopped multiple times to ask directions on his morning walk, people began to recognize him. His Dominican accent was funny to them. “You sound like you’re from Oriente,” they’d say, and he knew that they thought people “from Oriente” spoke as bad as all fuck. In spite of their economic hardship, people still had enough energy to put on the reggaeton, balada, or salsa music that poured from houses at the pathological volume used for listening to such things in the Caribbean.

Sitting on the Malecón, he would read a few pages of his disintegrating book until a high-school escapee would pull his attention away from it and toward her shapely legs and girlish shoes, or until the breeze would snatch a page from his negligent hands and he’d have to run a few meters to reach it. Then he would walk to Galiano Street and, after resting a few minutes in front of the Bellevue Hotel, walk the ten blocks back southwards to Chinatown.

He always arrived home dying of hunger, and then he’d put on a Cream CD while he prepared the cup of white rice he’d eat with ketchup. He’d drink another coffee, smoke a Popular, and, sitting on the living room sofa as he waited the last few hours until his injection, he’d plan his outings with Susana, choose the songs he’d play for her, deliberate which Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood he should take her to, even though he still hadn’t been to any of them.

The plastic hand of the wall clock neared four p.m. at exactly the same time as the needle with his daily 6mg neared his arm. Under the effects of the Temgesic he needed no entertainment. Listening to an entire King Crimson album in the rocking chair on the balcony was enough to feel sated for the rest of the day. Sometimes he’d draw in his mind – fugitive lines inspired by the music, abstract objects formed by the melodies, waves that repeated to the beat of the percussion. He would miss this creative calm when drugs were definitively out of his life.