By Sara
HAVANA TIMES – My daughter loves to bounce. Nevertheless, the geographical fatality of living within the countryside complicates matters. Ballet schools are within the capital. So, how do you explain to your 6-year-old daughter that her dream of being a dancer can’t be simply because she lives where she lives?
Whose fault is it? How do you explain that though you’re employed on daily basis, you may’t afford the travel expenses to the capital, pay for classes (that are private) plus buy clothes and shoes? Without counting expenses in snacks.
I’ve studied all my life, now I work and still can’t afford ballet classes for my daughter. This, in a society by which on daily basis children stop being children and start to grow sexualized to the beat of reggaeton, which is spread by whatever media outlet exists. Even when supposedly in a rustic where the rescue of traditions is advocated. And… isn’t ballet tradition too? Wasn’t Alicia Alonso, along with her ballet, the one who raised the name of Cuba?
Days go by, months go by. She keeps asking me if we’ll go to ballet classes. At that moment the image of her blurs in my eyes. So many questions that in her mind find no answer.
So, I tell her: “My love, now we have to attend for the pandemic to pass, now you realize you may’t travel.” Before the pandemic it was the transport crisis, later, I imagine something else will appear.
Today within the morning she told me: “turn off the music mom, (while she was hiding something in her hands), I caught the silence and I need to try it”… the silence caught me.
My daughter is 8 years old today, her name is Alicia, but she’s going to not be a dancer…
