Along with ninety-nine famous people I have been put in Time Magazine in their list of influential people of 2008.  As for me, I have never appeared on stage, or mounted a podium, even my own neighbors don’t know if “Yoani” is written with an intermediate “H” or a final “S.”  I am even… Continue reading What am I doing there?

  Elsa has bought a new DVD-player and an electric pressure cooker, but her husband warns that she must wait a bit for a mobile phone. He, who has seen things that made him shudder, still recalls the last “operation pot” of the nineties. On that occasion, his sister was accused of illicit enrichment and… Continue reading The fear of setback

This Sunday in the news the secretary-general of the Cuban Workers Confederation announced a 1st of May celebration where the ‘creative ingenuity’ of our people will be recognized. His words were accompanied by the well-known images of thousands of people parading in a Plaza full of posters, flags, and multicolored clothing. Seeing so much exuberance,… Continue reading Where do the posters come from?

You have not taken the red pill or the blue… but today you get up and reality appears purely decorative. You review the newspaper to rid yourself of this false taste and you confirm – on reading Granma – that fiction has officially become fact. Text from billboard: PCC = Communist Party of Cuba The… Continue reading Matrix

The news seems to go faster than life. Yesterday they called me from Spain – lately information travels abroad and then ricochets back to us – to tell me that it is no longer necessary to get an exit permit. As it happened, as soon as I received the news, I took myself off to… Continue reading How fast the news comes

On Saturday I went to Pinar del Rio to enjoy the streets empty of cars, the friends I have there, and that group of stubborn people who publish the magazine Coexistence. I put my bones in an almendrón* and arrived at the bus station with an acute pain in my neck. In the evening I… Continue reading How to say to him…

It gave me a little start to read the collection of papers devoted to Hector Zumbado on Penultimate Days and in the Blog of Enrisco. I fell into the story about how many we had given up for dead – this evil mania of burying people who are still breathing – to who was the… Continue reading The Prophecies of Zumbado

I am making a new university career. It is not related to any specialty but I can obtain a diploma of “Bachelor of Circumventing the Bureaucracy.” The subjects of study are the formalities and papers required to travel outside Cuba and the assignments carry a good dose of patience, meekness and mystery. To this crash… Continue reading Exit or Travel

I live in a utopia that is not mine. Before it, my grandparents crossed themselves and my parents gave their best years. Me, I took it on my shoulders without the power to shake it off.Some who don’t live it are trying to convince me – from a distance – that it must be preserved.… Continue reading Utopia imposed

In the middle school where my son studies we had a parent meeting that lasted almost three hours and almost ended in a fight. The central school director read Ministry of Education Resolution 177, approved last December, where it is established that the academic index will not be the determining factor when the time comes… Continue reading Incubating mediocrity