Today, a Latin American lady sang La Cucaracha in a tramway full of zombies. Faces behind the screens, some of them laughing behind their masks, couldn’t care less if some middle-aged homeless woman decided to break the monotony. 

La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
ya no puede caminar…

Honestly, she made my day. Not only did she make my day, but she also reminded me of the birthday of one of the greatest Spanish-language writers. 

“Debemos arrojar a los océanos del tiempo una botella de náufragos siderales, para que el universo sepa de nosotros lo que no han de contar las cucarachas que nos sobrevivirán: que aqui existió un mundo donde prevaleció el sufrimiento y la injusticia, pero donde conocimos el amor y donde fuimos capaces de imaginar la felicidad.” 

“We must throw a bottle of sidereal castaways in the oceans of time, so that the universe knows about us what the cockroaches that will survive us won’t tell: that here existed a world where suffering and injustice prevailed, but where we found love and were able to imagine happiness.”

“There is always something left to love”, said the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez in his most popular novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Born on this day in Aracataca, Márquez introduced one of the best Latin American literary genres – magical realism, where the line between reality and fiction is blurry. 

“and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love…” 

Ninety-five years after his birth, this author continues to create magic in the minds of his devoted readers. There is always something left to love, he would say, and his words are still echoing today while the ocean called humanity keeps getting dirtier. Gandhi once warned us: ‘You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.’ Marquez confirmed that only hope sustains us:

“You can’t eat hope,” the woman said.

“You can’t eat it, but it sustains you” the colonel replied.

– Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel

“The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.”

Ultimately, Márquez found his strength in love. 

“Think of love as a state of grace; not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.”

– Gabriel García Márquez, Love In the Time of Cholera

In the time of cholera, corona, or wars, there is always something left to love.