there are already among us several compatriots whose return was uncertain due to the new coronavirus pandemic.

Thanks to the cooperation between Cuban authorities and their counterparts in the countries involved, there are already among us several compatriots whose return was uncertain due to the new coronavirus pandemic.

Las Tunas, Cuba.- From one of the isolation centers, she tells us who was already part of our team of reporters long before. She returned from Mexico where she had gone as part of a university student exchange program.

Nothing like traveling to learn how to return; nothing like dressing up as a foreigner to value even more everything you say goodbye to. My travels have been many since the beginning of March, more than I would have imagined in my 20s.

Travelling was discovering people and places, learning what good and bad is all over the world. I ate a lot of chili more than four times, I confess; and I loved the diversity of flavors of Mexican cuisine, especially the famous tacos al pastor. I walked through the land of Frida, of Orozco, of Sor Juana Inés, I tried to dance band and I totally failed. But little by little, and almost from the first trip, the returns came.

You come back when you cook congri (rice with beans), even with strange ingredients; when you play the songs of the Van Van music group and dance alone in the room; when you look out the window every afternoon and understand that this is not your neighborhood; when you look back and know that this is not your bed. And at the moment your eyes take you back to the past, to happy places where your mother makes you a good coffee, the dominoes sound as loud as the voice of the neighbors, where some stranger greets you like an old friend.

But when an epidemic threatens the happiness of the world, then the returns are harder and harder. Then there is no place like your bed, like your neighborhood, there is no better coffee than that of the regular stores. And everything you breathe is never enough if it's not the Cuban air.

One morning I got a message from my University, announcing the confirmation of the flight, and that day the real returns began. When I landed in Havana all the Cubans applauded and my tears ran down as I looked at a sky, which is not because I am cheesy or more patriotic than anyone else, but in the end, it was true: there is no sky as blue as my sky.

The other return was to Las Tunas, and although it was already past 3:00 a.m., I had to wake up to see El Cornito bull. When we arrived at the Cerro de Caisimú, I thought about the occasions I shared with my friends and family, but this time I wasn't coming to have fun.

There I met a psychologist, a computer scientist, an economist, a tennis coach, whose conversations seemed to be taken from a Padura novel, with scrawny, disturbing stories and each of them with reasons for returning. Although, almost all of us agreed on the same thing: Here no one is abandoned.

Then another trip came, perhaps the saddest, because it was not by plane or by bus, but by ambulance. They brought me to another center for people with symptoms and nothing was as complicated as this transfer, especially because of my mother's voice on the phone, crying, telling me that she had just seen me pass in front of my house.

As soon as I entered the cabin, I turned on the television; by chance there was "that barbarian Fico, shooting with his mug mouth and I smiled so much that I forgot my sore throat.

Every morning the nurses wake me up to give me the medicines, with the sweetness of those who come to offer their hearts, as I always read in their plastic masks. Several times a day they check my temperature, give me advice and take an interest in my well-being. Perhaps one day I will see these people on the street and I will not be able to recognize them and thank them because the necessary disguises do not allow me to see beyond their good looks.

Uncertainty is the worst of fates and the only consolation that everyone gives me through social networks is: It doesn't matter, you are already in Cuba. I don't know what my next trip will be, I just hope it will be that happy return I've dreamed of so much: to my mother's embrace.