Category: Generation Y

I have a lot to tell about the events of these last days.  I know that you are waiting for the details about what happened at the concert on Thursday, the poster, the beatings, the arrests, the incredible police operation and all the stand-by activities in front of the Playa Municipal Tribunal that ended with… Continue reading From Gorki to Gustav

They took him because nothing destabilizes the intransigents more than a man in his most free state.  At the Fifth Police Station, 3rd and 62nd in Playa, where the criminals take turns and a toilet is a painful illusion, Gorki plucks the strings of his rebelliousness. He is a weird guy, everyone notices it, even… Continue reading Gorki

A city identifies itself not only by its people, its architecture or its plazas, but also by its billboards, posters and graffiti.  That is why I have gone out to photograph the signs in the area surrounding my house.  I post the sequence here so you can see the images and messages that surround me.… Continue reading What I see around me

He’s 28 and works at a hotel pool because his stepfather bought him a job in the tourism industry.  His command of English is awful but with the two thousand pesos he paid to the administrator, he didn’t have to prove he could speak it.  More than half the bottles of rum and coca cola… Continue reading The corruption of survival

More than twenty years of repairing the Soviet elevator and exercising on the stairs are nearing an end.  Two brand new Russian elevators have just been delivered to my building to replace the obsolete socialist technology.  We have had to wait until the ancient machinery exhibited an actual state of “danger to life”;  for the… Continue reading To go up and down

In the absence of tourist offices where a Cuban citizen can arrange – in Cuban pesos – an excursion in his own country, private resourcefulness has addressed this “market niche.”  During July and August it’s common to find posters advertisting a trip to the Bellamar Caves, Varadero, or the Zapata Swamp.  The organizers rent a… Continue reading Soroa

On the morning of August 13, 2001, I turned on the radio very early.  In a pompous voice an announcer intoned, “Today is the Fatherland’s birthday,” and then proceeded to read an interminable panegyric on the Maximum Leader.   Lying in bed I had the impulse to catapult myself to another galaxy, to escape from this… Continue reading Let others blow out the candles

It’s a long time until I will be ready to retire, still I have read very carefully the proposed Social Security Law that is going to be discussed by parliament.  Like many Cubans, I decided to work without a net and earn my living through freelancing because, to me, the guarantee of a future pension… Continue reading All for one beer

As a little girl I never could pronounce the name of this preschool near my house.  Even today – my study of phonics concluded – I make a mess of the pronunciation of the word “proletaritos.”   How will the little kids inside articulate the name of their nursery school?  Wouldn’t they prefer a more tender… Continue reading Dispossessed preschoolers

I heard screaming and realized that for a couple of weeks she wore dark glasses so that no one would notice the bruises.  Her husband is a militant in the Party and in the neighborhood nobody criticizes his testosterone excesses.  Both are part of a pattern of domestic violence, hushed up in the media, that… Continue reading Coexistence and its dangers