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.  

I act as the tongue of you, tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.                                                                            … Continue reading We vote for humor

  5:00 p.m. I’m at the door of the Café Cantante at the National Theatre. The program doesn’t interest me much, but I came with friend who is crazy about dancing. 5:27 p.m. The doorman asks as for our institutional affiliation, as the tables for nationals are reserved for a group of outstanding accountants.  I… Continue reading Parallel worlds

  Owning a home isn’t always a source of endless joys. Yes, the house is yours, but if you do not have resources to repair it or convertible pesos to buy the paint, cement or tiles that it needs, then you are the owner of a problem in the shape of a house. Of course… Continue reading Wings and an anchor

Here is the document that the Immigration office gave me with the denial “for the moment” of my request to travel abroad.  Click to download. negativa_viaje.pdf  

  For several weeks a new bus line has been circulating through the streets of Havana.  Painted bright red, plastered with huge advertisements and having an unusual upper floor, this new “spaceship” moves along the city’s main arterials on a ride that costs five convertible pesos.  Its clients are those tourists interested in a short… Continue reading From up above