075
Havana Windows
A Tribute to a Dear Cuban Friend
Doctor Louis Rolando Gonzalez
1927 - 1997

From a letter I wrote to my dear Cuban friend Doctor Louis Gonzalez in 1997 just before he died.

"Those rusted iron bars will still remain on your balcony window - later, when you have ceased to peer out at the passing throng in Municipio Street below. After you're gone, the bare lamp-bulb by the door at street level beneath will still attract moths and still swing in the evening breeze to the forgotten tunes of your youth from the radios that blare forth the sounds of  beating guitars.
Oh! Luis Rolando my friend! Forgive me for being so saturnine and brooding. You only need to scratch me superficially to find philosophical morbidity just below the surface! "

It was no more than a passing comment by me regarding the above wistful photograph of my Cuban friend Dr Louis Rolando Gonzalez, shirtless because of the heat, sitting on his veranda enjoying a beer. The picture shows him looking through the window-bars of his balcony of his second floor apartment dwelling in Havana. We had been "pen-friends" since 1959 the year that Fidel Castro came to power and established the communist government to 1997, the year that he passed away. It was an incredibly close and intimate correspondence lasting over 38-years particularly the last couple of years when the realisation of our mutual mortality began to occupy our minds. .
He died in the hospital in which he used to work as a medical doctor after two severe heart-attacks. I still have all his letters including the last one he wrote to me from his hospital bed. I have decided to bequeath all of Louis' letters to his son Irving Gonzalez before I die.

The bare light-bulb can be seen underneath where Louis is sitting.
No doubt it will continue to swing after I am gone too.