Category: Generation Y

There are certain elders to whom the carefree attitude of the youngest produce burning and regret.  They are those who intuit that those who follow will wash away everything that for them is “holy.” They are right.  Nothing is more fearsome than a teenager who wastes his time and threatens to “change everything.”  And these are… Continue reading Youngsters

I would like to announce to the start of two new Blogs written from Cuba that are on this same portal.  Both are under pen names although in one of them the author will dispense with the mask shortly. “Sin EVAsión” [Without Evasion] announces itself as “a blog with a temporary mask but with permanent… Continue reading Oxygen for the blogosphere

Today I got up with a sore throat. The guilty party was the impertinent cold wind on the Malecón, to which I exposed myself last night while talking with a friend.  We talked for an hour – thinking we were fixing the world and the Island – without realizing that the temperature was falling. That’s… Continue reading Search and seizure

Since a couple of days ago, there is a new parliament.  Note that I don’t say “we have,” but that the form I use is impersonal, remote and alien.   These 614 deputies that have ensured their seats in the National Assembly will have, during the next five years, the boring task of assenting, unanimously,… Continue reading Parliament comes from “parleying”

For three days the newspaper Granma, in its two center pages, inundated us with all the anniversaries that in 2008 have a number ending in a five. Along with the 155 years since the birth of José Martí, we could read about the 125th anniversary of the death Karl Marx and the half-century of the… Continue reading The end of history and the last Cuban

I remember when, in 1994 they allowed licenses to open a private restaurant (paladar) or a cafeteria.  Havana filled with improvised kiosks that brought back lost flavors and desired recipes.  Within a couple of months all the creativity showed in hundreds of umbrellas, tables on  porches and even sophisticated places to try a mamey shake… Continue reading The hidden energies?

In a place of obligatory confluence, beside the main door of the Dihigo building, rests the reddish mastodon known as the “bench at the Literary School.” On it have rested, in the last decades, the most illustrious behinds of our intellectual class.  Many of those knowledgeable derrières rest today on a couch in Paris or… Continue reading The bench at the Literary School

Last year Cuban newspapers strongly criticized the rebirth of the “consumerist” tradition of the Three Wise Men.   They describe the crowds that, for days, filled  the toy stores with convertible pesos and they attacked the social differences that this practice generates.  This January the authorities have found the solution to avoiding “excessive spending” and… Continue reading The Three Wise Men on foot

A dozen or so kids attacked my friend Geraldo and his girlfriend one night at the beginning of December.   They were walking by Belascoaín street when the mob, which was getting out of a concert in a nearby park, intercepted them.  My friend’s backpack was the main temptation and the purse in Elena’s shoulder… Continue reading Red Chronicles or “the city is not the same anymore…”

People start arriving before seven in the morning. There is everything: dreamers, the disillusioned, and even provocateurs. They wait under a tree, perhaps a flamboyan tree, to the side of the Central Committee.  They are there because they wish to present their letters, repeat their requests or check, for the umpteenth time, if their pleas… Continue reading The Wishing Tree