Photo: Tito Texidor III

11. 12. 2021

#HANDSOFFCUBA


Wendy Trevino


We riot & riot & Cuba never comes, not
Venezuela or Bolivia either & at this point
Who wouldn’t take whatever help they could get
In the middle of a pandemic, a year from an uprising
A year into a new counter-insurgency, watching
The Gulf of Mexico burn, losing power
On the coldest 5 days in 40 years, wading
Into the subway station, feeling like fire is legit
The 5th season, waking up to a layer of ash
On everything outside, the air not safe
To breathe, red skies, thinking you can’t
Even count on seeing the sun in the sky anymore
Wondering when you’ll lose your housing, if
Truly everyone will ever have clean water, in a city
Where empty apartments outnumber people
Who can’t afford housing & what the government’s
Position on the broke people imprisoned
Amounts to is “they will either develop
An immunity or die” & there are still prisoners
The public isn’t allowed to know too much about
In Guantanamo Bay, in the USA-occupied
Part of Cuba & Cuba never comes.

Wendy Trevino was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She lives and works in San Francisco and has published chapbooks with Perfect Lovers Press, Commune Editions, and Krupskaya Books. Brazilian no es una raza – a bilingual edition of the chapbook she published with Commune Editions – was published by the feminist Mexican press Enjambre Literario in July 2018. Her first book-length collection of poems, Cruel Fiction, was published by Commune Editions in September 2018. Wendy is not an experimental writer.

Related:

  • Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.
  • Moments of Vast Possibility Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Misha Falk discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.
  • What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.
  • Unsealing the Echo Chamber Kate Klein on tactics and strategies for mining justice organizing in the COVID-19 era, when corporations are increasingly using digital technology to stifle dissent.