The day Nidia Norway stood with her children outside the house of the president of Cuba, she was wearing a red sweater copied from the Moschino brand, a white scarf on her head and an insult that she had kept for years. Nobody knew exactly where Miguel Díaz-Canel’s house was, until Nidia and three other mothers, along with a gang of rowdy children, stood up a few days ago to look for an answer that to this day they have not received.
Díaz-Canel’s house, which like all the whereabouts of Cuban leaders has always been a mystery, was found by people who have no home. In Cuba, there are no official residences like the White House, Los Pinos, or the Moncloa Palace. It was always known that Fidel and the Castro family lived in Punto Cero, in the farthest area of the Playa municipality, west of Havana, on the grounds of an old golf course, a place that not even we Cubans try to imagine. Punto Cero was so far away that it really seemed outside the margins of Cuba.
Díaz-Canel’s is located on the grounds of the old Biltmore Yacht & Country Club, right in front of Avenue 146, and Nidia did not find it now, but a few years ago when she was taking her children to the beach. She saw several cars and asked a guard what was happening in the area and he told her that it was near the president’s house. From a distance, she could see that there is a swimming pool, and a wide expanse of land, she could not see much more because they have never let her advance beyond the entrance gate. Nidia has not seen the house, but she says it is a mansion. Nidia has never seen a mansion, but she imagines what it is, something that she does not have to know. The first time she stood up to demand a home in front of the ruler’s house, her youngest daughter was one year old. She is now seven and still homeless.
On the last of her visits, they recorded a video that she and the other mothers spread on social networks in which they say they can’t take it anymore. Not only do they have no home, in a city where according to official figures 1,000 homes collapse every year, and where 600,000 people live in almost uninhabitable places. They also say that they are hungry.
Most of Cuba’s protests in recent times have been driven by women. Not only the massive or media ones like those of July 2021 or March 2024, but also the most unpublished or fleeting ones, the day-to-day ones. Women in Cuba are the ones who constantly throw themselves on the streets. Their struggle does not have only one face, nor only one claim. They have been seen demanding basic needs such as food, health, food, water, electricity or housing, which have been at the center of Cubans’ dissatisfaction in recent years.
There is the Cuban mother who sat with her two daughters and several empty containers in the middle of a street in Old Havana, as a protest against the shortage of drinking water and electricity cuts. Or the mothers of Maisí, who came out with water tanks, empty from so many days without supplies. There is the mother who showed up at the municipal government of Marianao in search of milk, with her son in her arms and a devastating cry. There are mothers outside the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, with their children with serious illnesses that no one cares for.
At 18, Nidia left her mother’s house with her first newborn child, where 20 people live in one room. She ran away to a shelter where she stayed for three years. She also once snuck in to live in a court facility. She spent some time on the street with the children. She went to another shelter, where her four other children were born, who do not know what it is to have a home.
“My children have always lived in shelters, since they were born,” says Nidia, 32, who cleans floors at the provincial government headquarters, where she has been threatened with expulsion if she continues visiting the vicinity of the president’s house.
After 15 years in shelter, Nidia is in a transit home, a place that gets wet when it rains, that is flooded with pit water and that the Government has given her while promising her a house that has not yet arrived. Tired of waiting for the Government, Nidia has stood four times outside the place where Díaz-Canel resides.
“I don’t give anymore,” he said. “I want to take a bag of pills and have them take me to the Military Hospital. And when she gets to the military she is already dead, they say that Nidia has already died.”
In the sentry box of the ruler’s house, she and the rest of the mothers were told that it was not allowed to reach that place, to cross the lines between the people and power, as the Government has always guaranteed. After a while the police and officials from the Juvenile Department arrived, put them in a patrol car and cleared the place. In Nidia’s last police summons, an officer asked her if she knew that “incitement” can be punished with up to three years in prison. Nidia told him that she was not inciting anyone. The agent repeated that they should not come back, that they would end up behind bars.
“I told him: ‘Well, give me 30 years, because I’m going to continue,’ says Nidia. As long as she doesn’t have a home, she is going to return to Díaz-Canel’s. There or in other parts of the island, there will always be a mother knocking on her door.
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