Category: Generation Y

In the Central Havana of guapos* and brawls where I was born, I learned that there are certain lines that a woman should never cross.  I have spent my life breaking the laughable rules of machismo, but today – and only today – I am going to take refuge in one of them, and precisely… Continue reading Men’s matters

  Along with many others in Havana, I am distressed by the police operation that dismantled various manufacturing networks that made plastic plates, teaspoons, and hair clips.  In the midst of a sweep against “social indiscipline” the police – after sweeping up the “divers” [see Blog entry “Diving in murky waters” June 10, 2008] –… Continue reading Loose hair

Thanks to the friends I’ve gained through this Blog, I have a copy of the novel Chiquita, winner of this year’s Alfaguara Prize. It is likely that I have one of the few copies on the island, which compels me to read it quickly and pass it on to the list of friends who are… Continue reading Chiquita

  As in a game of pick-up sticks, where a fistful of thin rods are dropped from above, so have my colleagues and I been scattered across the enormous tabletop of the globe.  Those of us who studied together in the same classrooms, exchanged ideas or worked together on projects, could now make a network… Continue reading The hand that throws the sticks

I believe I am one of the few Cubans under forty who reads the national press every day.  My friends, seeing this eccentric hobby, have warned me that this may be the shortest route to a stomach ulcer.  However, I like to search the press for the rising profile of one or another political figure,… Continue reading Diving in murky waters

  The vast yellow and red market on Mount Street resembles, for the last couple of weeks, a disciplined intellectual space for gatherings rather than a crowded marketplace of fruits and vegetables. A police operation eliminated all the illegal vendors who had filled its vestibules and established order in the mess inside where it was… Continue reading Four roads but only one direction

  Since I moved – fifteen years ago – to this huge socialist-style apartment block, I have not received a single letter by regular service. The reason is not that my friends have forgotten me, or that email has dethroned the traditional ways of sending a missive, but rather that Cubans do not trust the… Continue reading Without correspondence

  Reading the book “The Seventh Secretary” by Michel Heller has brought back to me masses of memories of the “Soviet phase” of this little island. At that time, I was not yet fifteen years old and I have strong sensory evocations of this colonial period. I recall sweets and foods purchased through the informal… Continue reading Evoking the bolos*

Accustomed to manufacturing for ourselves everything that has disappeared from the market, or that we cannot afford, or that simply isn’t sold, many of us in Generation Y have designed our own clothes. I remember, back in the eighties, taking in the seams of my trousers to make the legs tight and then, years later,… Continue reading The “Y” Fashion

  Someone speaks in my name. They subsume me in the first person plural that, when they say, “we Cubans will not allow…, our people will not accept…” includes all of us without asking any of us. The political discourse of Cuba is full of this schizophrenia of the first person plural.