Sometimes I think you have to be Latin American to understand and feel in your whole body the magical essence of my south. At least you need to have a special soul, a very sensitive one, to picture the slaves in the palenques when the rhythm is playing; or the criollos praying to Caridad del Cobre for a better life; or the Mapuches fighting for their lands and rights; or Gardel singing “Volver” while a random couple dances tango; or just to understand the meaning of the yellow butterflies of Mauricio Babilonia and take it as a regular event.

I arrived here barely a month ago, and I remember noW my first class about Latin America in America, I mean, USA. It was an Economy class and the teacher told us to read Funes the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian author, one of the best in Latin America. I was so excited and a little shocked because, what were the chances to read just that short story here? For me it was a well-known story, one of those I had been reading since the beginning of my love for Borges and Latin American literature. It was like facing the essential. And also it was a sign of destiny: one of the few book I took with me when I left Cuba was precisely a collection of Borges’s poetry, essays and short stories.

I read Funes again, and went to class hoping to have the most amazing discussion about the surreal character and his particular gift. Then I realized that the teacher and me were the only ones really captivated by the story, the way Borges told extraordinary things, narrated a continent in a few pages. In the end my classmates talked about economy, Latin America, Funes, but they hadn’t understood anything. They didn’t understand how Funes, the character, was the memory of things, the memory of people, the memory of my part of this great continent.

And I thought: what would happen if they read García Márquez? Would they feel something, anything? Would they care? Would their imagination burst with One Hundred Years of Solitude? In this novel, García Márquez created the trend of magic realism. He invented a new way to talk about Latin America, and put into words the most authentic soul of our history and traditions. My classmates, studying Latin American issues, didn’t know _ and they still don’t _ who that man was.

Because of that novel I really felt as part of the land for the first time. It happened more than ten years ago, reading the story of Coronel Aureliano Buendía’s family, killed by fire, born and raise in Macondo, a little town lost in the middle of nowhere, blessed and cursed by their people and the universe and by history, with a common life full of normal magic events, just like Latin America. That time I could felt in my bones the weight of an entire civilization. I saw how people believe without any god or with all of them; or the way of dying is grew a pair of wing out of nothing and just fly to the sky; and the way of love is turned into a millions of yellow butterflies; and live is just a matter of curiosity, but in a big, transcendental way, that turns out to be just the normal, obvious way to do it.

One year after reading García Márquez’s novel –I was 14 years old– a friend of mine invited me to my first toque de santo, an afrocuban religious ceremony where people offered food, music and dancing to yoruba saints. It is the moment to sacrifice animals as an offer and to communicate with those saints. These ceremonies usually are an overwhelming experience for the beginners because of the animal’s blood, the strong music of batá drums and the unnatural force of the dancers. There is a spiritual violence in the performances, like an aggression, but it is actually just a very personal feeling and a demonstration of individual faith.

Afterwards, my English friend and I started to talk about it, and I was shivering, and shocked, trying to process what I had seen because it had been very powerful to me. But he, well, he was only excited with the experience. For him had been just another exotic thing to watch in Cuba. For him had been a bunch of black people getting crazy with some music.

He couldn’t felt the rumba in his blood; the saint’s words speaking through human’s mouth; the ancient deaths embodying live men. He couldn’t felt the magical essence of a strongly rooted tradition, a deeply ingrained faith. And more than that, he couldn’t felt the history behind that ceremony, years and years of slavery and struggle and fighting to reach freedom.

Like my English friend, my American classmates from USA can’t feel those tradition, perhaps because they are not their own, perhaps they get lost in translation. The difference is that my English friend was just visiting Cuba as a tourist, and my classmates want to change the world and help other countries and people. But how can you help others if you can’t get into their world, their tradition, their culture? I know, there is a difference between feeling and understanding, but sometimes just understanding is fine; it could be the first step to reaching my south, that part of the world beyond USA border.