Havana is a city of slow solutions or incredibly precipitous ones. In the case of a deteriorating building, where the inhabitants live among the scaffolding with pieces of the ceiling falling in, the remedies take time and the necessary housing takes decades to construct. But if the question is to close, to limit or to… Continue reading Shakespearean tragedy

I know this reference comes from close at hand, but I recommend to you my interview with a Cuban rafter that appeared in the Number 7 of the digital magazine Consensus – From Cuba. Here are the links. This is a link to the Spanish-language article. A link to the English translation will be posted… Continue reading Interview with a rafter

After Raúl Castro’s speech on July 26, I ran into several friends who greeted me in a similar way, alluding to the “glass of milk” promised by him in front of the cameras.  From the nearly sixty minutes of his panegyric, people extracted this promise, announced like a conquest achieved, “that every Cuban can drink”… Continue reading And my glass of milk?

I avoid using words such as “eternal,” “always” and “never .”  The definitive scares me and the everlasting stinks.  So when I hear a political speech where someone says “its fire will be as eternal as the Revolution,” referring to the fragile fire of a torch, I run to my dictionaries and calm my fright… Continue reading Similes, eternity and power

In what are called “Stores of Currency Collection,” notice carefully that the stated objective is not to provide a service or to satisfy clients, but to remove the money from your pocket… seriously! This well-patronized model is a set of stores called “All for One.” You can find everything there from plaster figurines through scrub… Continue reading All for one

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