Nonfiction | January 13, 2026

The Story of My Eyes 

Gustavo Pérez Firmat 

For Leon Herndon 

During my teenage years, when I heard things go bump in the night, it was usually my grandmother running into the furniture on the way to the bathroom. Some nights she didn’t make it in time.  

Years after her death, my mother remarked casually that her mother’s blindness was caused by cataracts, but that she refused to see doctors because the only one she trusted was her father, who had died when she was eleven years old. I was puzzled that my mother and her three siblings did not insist that their mother consult an oculista, an eye specialist, but in their world—Cuba in the middle decades of the last century—people accepted afflictions like blindness as fate. That Abuela Martínez couldn’t see was a given, like her recurrent dyspepsia. I have no idea whether my mother’s informal diagnosis was correct.  

In Cuba, Abuela Martínez’s eyesight was already failing, but she saw well enough to lead an independent life. The only times I rode a bus as a child were with her. That’s how she got around Havana, unlike the rest of the family. She and my mother were close, and I saw my grandmother almost every week. Her eyesight was too weak for reading, but she was able to play canasta with her grandchildren. To see the hand she was holding, she closed her left eye and placed the cards up against her right eye, “the good one.” To my credit, it never occurred to me to take advantage of her impairment.  

She never owned eyeglasses, but some years later, in Miami, had a magnifying glass that she used to write to her youngest son, Tío Richard, who lived in New York City. Using a blunt pencil, she filled a page with three or four slanted sentences. By the middle 1960s, the magnifying glass didn’t magnify enough, and I began taking dictation for her letters. After we finished, I’d put a pencil in her hand and guide it to the bottom of the sheet, where she’d blind-sign, “Mamá.” Then she’d root around in a little pouch inside her purse. She’d take out some coins, and I’d pick a quarter, which she called a peseta, a Cuban coin worth twenty cents. It was my payment for something I shouldn’t have been paid for.