Yesterday I went to the International Book Fair in the Cabaña Fort, east of Havana. Thanks to a reader of this Blog, who gave me some titles from her small Spanish publisher, I left with something in my hands.  The prices in convertible pesos persuaded me not to buy anything, although I believe I… Continue reading Afternoon of texts and disappointments

  The images of the fall of the Berlin Wall I saw for the first time eleven years after the events of that October 1989.  At that time, few Cubans had access to a video player or to the foreign press. The news came to us when it was already history. The young man who… Continue reading Habeas data

The elections of February 24th are approaching and in the streets of my city few people ask who will be our next president. However, I have decided to conduct an exercise – a useless one – to point out what I would like in the next person who is going to represent us: I don’t… Continue reading From the house to the Nation

I’m pretty absent-minded. I can leave my keys in the house and close the door, and leave my wallet in the refrigerator. So I am forced to use a bunch of tricks not to forget anything. I have an engagement book where I write what I need to do and I write on scraps of… Continue reading From the same pocket

What pushed me to this adventure of writing a Blog was the bad taste left at the end of the controversy of the intellectuals in January 2007. On an afternoon like today, the 30th of January, we waited – a group of young people – to be able to enter the conference: “The gray five… Continue reading A year later

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