How long have I been in my room? Hours probably. I can hear the music flowing from the poolside party at the Nacional. There's a poolside party every night. Who might be performing tonight? Someone I want to hear, like Pablo Milanes or Los Van Van. The first few nights I went to the party, drank rum, talked to the few people I had met. But I got tired. Tired of drinking rum, tired of talking with people that I'd run out of things to say to. Tired of the endless wait for some music, which usually never came.

This is Cuba. This is the Havana Film Festival in the 1980s. There's barely any printed program. There's barely any printed anything. Or if there is, it runs out right away. Like snacks at a cocktail party in a country where everyone's hungry. So I go, drink rum, try to talk with someone, go back to my room, up the hill at the Habana Libre, built as the Havana Hilton before the Revolution.

I like it. It's mid century modern. It has serious art, commissioned by the Hilton company back in the day. It has good bars and not too terrible food. It does smell of stale tobacco smoke, but I grew up in this city, where everything smells of tobacco. And the mirrors give back an image twenty pounds heavier. Maybe it's from the days when women were supposed to be over-the-top curvaceous and the prosperous men who married them or kept them were supposed to be portly. At least that's what I remember. Now my enlarged image freaks me out every time I walk down the hall to the elevator, particularly if I'm on my way to lunch. But hunger wins out and I forget about the fat boy in the mirror. Not that I'm hungry like my fellow Cubans who never left. I'm just a glutton. And I drink. Everyone drinks. A lot. I love Cuban rum and in a society where, as in all the Latin countries I've been to, drinking a lot is the norm, I join right in. Of course, alcohol accelerates depression. And I am depressed.

I decide to venture out. On my way to the elevator I'm joined by a young couple who've just come out of a room. They're high, probably on rum, maybe on drugs, certainly on sex. When I say hello, the woman recognizes my Cuban accent and concludes, from my clothes and the fact that I'm staying in the hotel, that I hail from the US. “It's not your fault your parents took you out of here”, she says, both she and her partner shimmering with erotic and chemical energy. Maybe she's Cuban, the daughter of exiles, now in sympathy with the Revolution much to her parents’ chagrin. I can't tell. I'm not focused, barely waking up from my depressed hotel-room solitude.

She touches me. Kindness. Solidarity. I want to strangle her. They're both small, they guy is younger but I have pounds on him. I want to kill them both. They offend me. They offend my depression. I'm not like her – something tells me he's local. No one took me out of here. I was glad to leave. And it was before the Revolution, which my whole family was in sympathy with. I certainly was, but with each visit to Cuba less and less. And right now not at all.

I'm no fighter, but I'm bigger and I'm not high. Maybe I could knock him out. Then drag her back to my room and first rape her and then strangle her. Yes, that's what I want to do. That would short-circuit my depression. That would make me feel alive. A new man. A new Cuban man. One whom no parents took out of here before he decided the Revolution was righteous. One who has come back ostensibly to write about it, but, in truth, is looking for something, the answer to something, the key to something. Well, here's the key. Rape. Murder. Redemption. Revolution.

Right now I can't imagine writing anything. This has been a wasted trip. But I will write. I always do. It will reflect my political ambiguity. It will be clever with an undercurrent of darkness. It will be sensuous. But it will be a lie. The truth is here, in this hotel hall on the way to the elevator, in the company of a young couple besotted with sex and rum and who knows what else. In the offense I'm given unintentionally. In my rage, ripping a tear in my depression. In the crimes I want to commit in the name of my anonymous passage through history. In the pain I want to inflict. In my bloodlust and my lust. In my desire to join the carnage – the killing of rebellious Indians, the hunt for runaway slaves, the public garrotings, the machete charges of the wars of independence, the torture of revolutionary prisoners, the firing squads manned by revolutionaries. I want to be purified by violence. I want to be finally and fully Cuban.

Enrique Fernandez