Category: Generation Y

Every day I see for myself that they’ve robbed us of the recipe and the art of making bread, our bread… and I’m not saying this in the metaphorical sense of “making love,” as we say in Cuba, but rather in the plain and straightforward meaning of preparing the universal food, our daily bread… this… Continue reading The bread recipe

For years I boasted that I could become “invisible,” because at any moment I chose I could immediately go undetected and escape from complicated situations. Wrapped in this “Harry Potter” cloak, I eluded membership in the Union of Communists Youth, because — an incredible thing considering Cuba’s ideological extremism of the 1980s — no one… Continue reading The gift of invisibility

I left cyberspace for a few days because a virus, named after the villain of a current Brazilian soap opera, has left me nothing to do but take hydration salts, eat mashed taro root and worry about whether or not there’s a tropical version of Ebola… fortunately it’s over and I’m back.

You know what it feels like when you try to pedal a bicycle with a rusted chain, a bent sprocket and stuck bearings? Well that’s the feeling that crushes me these days. All my energies, efforts and desires to do something are wasted on a mechanism that doesn’t move forward. At times, I have the… Continue reading Pedaling

For the last six months, morning orientations have been reinstated, like an obligation, in all workplaces. This is not a new direction, simply a return to an old one that in recent years had been put out to pasture along with the other things “almost no one believes in.” So, alongside the militia uniform, the… Continue reading Morning orientations return

I want to share a paragraph taken from the book Prints of San Cristobal by Jorge Mañach.* In a text devoted to some sculptures in the shape of frogs, once located in Maceo Park (curiously, because although this was one of the parks of my childhood, I do not remember such frogs… if anyone ever… Continue reading Mañach and the new

In these times, when it’s fashionable to reflect on the problems of others and to ignore the immediate and the near by, I propose to touch on issues beyond the narrow framework of my home and my city. I thought then of the Australian Aborigines, discriminated against in their own country, of the problems in… Continue reading Reflections…

  “Going to Havana?” the driver shouts as me, as if the corner of Boyeros and Tulipán where I am standing is not part of the city where I was born and live.  I respond with a gesture of the finger to the left and confirm: “Yes, going to the Fraternity*,” because I like to… Continue reading In the shadow of an “almendrón”

“Going to Havana?” the driver shouts as me, as if the corner of Boyeros and Tulipán where I am standing is not part of the city where I was born and live. I respond with a gesture of the finger to the left and confirm: “Yes, going to the Fraternity*,” because I like to make… Continue reading In the shadow of an “almendrón”

This week we have anti-television therapy in our house. We started gradually and are now at the stage of turning on the “smug little fatty” but not turning up the volume. What this accomplishes is extremely interesting. Before our eyes pass images, so predictable that one’s own imagination adds the voice and sound. If there… Continue reading When I watch TV…