• “Galician girl with eyes so dark…I want to be your preferred one…do not deny me your love…without you it will be hard to keep on living…my soul belongs completely to you…until the end of time…” ¹

     Or at least until the end of the story: In novels, movies, and TV shows, a person breathing her or his last breath, or who is in a hopeless, life-threatening situation, often has flashbacks. It is a plot device that allows the author to tell the reader/viewer how the person got to the end of their life: The character’s life passes before her or his eyes as he or she stands (metaphorically speaking) knocking at death’s door, lying in a pool of blood after being shot or stabbed. And it is often something like that last night he or she spent with a lover before they fought, and either she dumped him, or he dumped her.
     This is certainly one cliché-filled way to try to engage the reader/viewer; and nonlinearity is all the rage in the nonlinear age in which we live. According to Jorge Luis Borges, linear time is and has always been all in our heads, a necessary simplification the brain makes, like painting a binary world in tones of black and white, good and evil. There is certainly little about any real universe that is linear or binary. Of course,
flashbacks do happen to traumatized survivors, coma patients sometimes wake up and tell us what they heard, and persons who had recovered after clinical death in a hospital report seeing and hearing things; there is no reason to doubt them.
     However, none of the above happens to any real person who is laying on the ground and dying a real death after really being shot or stabbed.² 
     Now, A Tale of Two Families had reached its final, blood-soak chapter: The End. Don Hermógenes (which is also the name of Socrates’s best friend, though it sounds a bit like “beautiful genes” in Spanish) lies on his back on a pier in the port face up; the handle of a large knife protruded out of the left side of his chest, indicating that the heartless assassin was aiming for the victim’s heart. But there was little blood (typical of heart wounds). Probably some Cuban-born terrorist like José Martí, don Hermógenes might have thought (if this were a book, as he lay on the ground dying and talking to the attacker that stood over him. In the movies, he surely would have recognized the face of his attacker, and we would have heard any words they exchanged. Not in real life, not in real death.) Yes, it was odd, don Hermógenes’s clear blue eyes were still open, it almost looked like there was a smile on his face as if he had just greeted a beloved friend or family member; even in death, don Hermógenes was an impressive specimen of a man: tall, robust, trimmed dark hair with bits of grey, steel-blue eyes, a firm jaw and a straight nose that fit his face exactly, neither too small nor too big, a trimmed beard and mustache, impeccably dressed, as the soon-to-be former Spanish governor of Santa Clara province would be on this warm, muggy Havana night. But his expensive Spanish pipe, a family heirloom from the Netherlands, had fallen on the ground, spilling its fine but pungent Cuban tobacco around him:
     “He was talking to a mulato³," a witness told the policeman. “They had words, but I didn’t hear what was said, I usually don’t listen into our people’s business. No, I didn’t see his face; it all happened so fast, and then it was over; the assailant was gone. Sorry, I need to board the ship now; it is sailing at midnight.”
     Other passengers continued to arrive and board the ship for Spain, hardly paying any attention to the police. After all, the body was covered, so anyone leaving Cuba for Spain would not have recognized don Hermógenes. But his family in Vigo would hear about the circumstance of his passing soon enough; and had this been a TV show, a Spanish-Cuban song would now be playing in the background:

• “Para Vigo me voy…mi negra⁴ dice adiós…”

      What is the difference between Cuban-Spanish and Spanish-Cuban, you ask? Cuba’s national hero José Martí, who died a martyr in 1895 while attempting to overthrow almost four centuries of Spanish rule three years before the U.S. invasion, was Cuban-Spanish, born and raised in Cuba but Spanish by nationality (after his first run-in with the law as a teen, Martí was “deported” to Spain, his own country, where his punishment was to attend university, after which he become a renowned poet and journalist in Mexico and the U.S., and then finally a martyr in Cuba):

• “Yo soy un hombre sincero, de donde crece la palma…Guantanamera…”

     Xavier Cugat on the other hand, the author of “Off to Vigo I Go”, was a Spaniard who emigrated a la Cuba libre after Cuba was granted limited independence in 1902 (the right of the U.S. to intervene militarily and permanently occupy Guantánamo was written into the Cuban Constitution, making la Cuba libre the United States’s first banana republic).
     Meanwhile, in another part of la Habana (today mainly known as the city of vintage vehicles from the 1950s), in a beautiful old mansion worthy of a man of power and wealth, surrounded by well-kept lawns and trees behind a beautiful wall, a young man had just arrived home. He's a dark, smooth, serious young man, his face and bare arms glistening with sweat like that of a professional dancer:

• “It’s done, mamá. No one saw my face.”

• “Muy bien, hijito. You have saved our family from disgrace and ruin. You did the right thing, like a good son.”

     Several weeks later on the other side of the Atlantic, another mother and her children sat for a family photograph; Fate had prevented don Hermógenes from sitting for the photo himself; so, his Spanish wife had the photographer “cut and paste” her late husband’s photo into the family portrait (they did a very good job, I have seen it). And yes, even in the photo the now dead don Hermógenes is an impressive specimen of a man. Had he been an American, he no doubt would have been remembered in Nashville in a country and western song, perhaps “All My Exes Live in Cuba or Spain…”

1 My non-literal translation from the Cuban-Spanish tango Galleguita.
2 I base my conclusions on the fact that I have been close to dying or being killed a number of times, and not once did I have a flashback about my life during the life-threatening incident, nor have I ever had a flashback related to any life-threatening incident.
3 In Spanish, “mulato” refers to a man of mixed black and white racial characteristics, but it has absolutely no derogatory meaning in Spanish.
4 In Spanish, “mi negra” o “mi negro” is a term of affection. I mention this because Americans are used to thinking that any reference to race or ethnicity is a slur. E.g., the expression “the black sheep of the family” refers to the fact that farmers of ALL races prefer white sheep… because you cannot die black wool. The expression has NO racial content whatsoever.