On the nature of friendship

When I left Cuba I lost my best friend. Ernesto, unlike many of my friends, kids I’d known since kindergarten, was a Christian, and dark enough to pass for mulatto.
We met in high school (Instituto de la Vibora), on a boxing ring, facing each other from behind sixteen ounce gloves, because the PE instructor caught us arguing. [“There will be no fighting in my class,” he was fond of saying]
After we punched each other for one interminably long round, we discovered we were neighbors, started to walk to school together and became friends.
We celebrated Batista’s fall together—Ernesto is the one who woke me very early on January first 1959 with the news that Batista was gone and we had to go capture Vibora high school, for the revolution. And yet, we didn’t become Castro’s acolytes. We remained on our seats while everyone else jumped to their feet to cheer, stomp and clap every time a movie house newsreel showed Fidel, or Che, or Camilo. We discussed our learnings endlessly—we used to talk for hours and hours and after saying good bye, talked some more—and after a few months concluded that Castro’s was to be a communist regime.
But we didn’t panic. We didn’t run for the hills. We set out to see what communism was all about. I soon concluded it was not for me but my friend embraced it, hook, line and doctrine. A couple ever worsening years later, I managed to get out.
We remained friends via long letters. I imagine my letters reflected my struggles (I have been known to complain) just as his letters reflected his environment, the excitement he felt as the revolution developed. His letters were tinged with unintended propaganda. If there is one thing Fidel Castro excelled at was propaganda, constant, relentless, repetitive, pervasive propaganda.
His letters made me angry. I was poor—refugee poor—and lonely. And cold. My other Cuban friends were in Miami or New York or almost everywhere else in the world, not in Boston. I was working my way through school while my parents, who came to the States a year after I did, struggled.
I didn’t have time nor patience for more of Castro’s lies. At first I felt compelled to challenge him and reveal the real truth. It was no use. I stopped writing.
In my mind he remained my friend. I never thought of him as anything else. With the advent of the Internet I tried to locate him. After years of trying I succeeded a couple years ago, only because he had done so well. He is a respected scholar and a published author.
My first email—sent through his publisher—elicited an immediate and happy reply. We resumed our friendship as if nothing had happened but the passing of fifty years. He didn’t question me, he didn’t ask why I stopped writing. We caught up by email, we exchanged pictures of wives and children and grandchildren. Pictures of our present selves.
At times I asked him about events we shared, moments I am including in my ‘forever in progress’ memoir. Each of us remembered things the other had forgotten. We exchanged so many emails I fear the NSA must have opened a special storage facility for them.
We still email from time to time. We remain friends, albeit separated by distance and circumstances. His emails are still tainted with Castro propaganda. He can’t help it. He doesn’t see it as such. It is what he believes. It is how things are over there. He is a communist of the first magnitude because he understands it. But I’m no longer troubled by his comments. I no longer challenge or try to argue.
Perhaps this means that after fifty years I have mellowed, or grown up, or perhaps I am able to separate political belief from the person’s inherent nature. He was a good man and a good friend back then and he remains so.
I would like to go back and visit. I would like to revisit places where events took place that are important for my memoir. I petitioned for a permit. I’m willing to bet that if I’m allowed to go, we’ll embrace and resume talking and interrupting each other as if nothing had happened. Maybe this time I’ll take notes so I can remember what it was we had so much to talk about.