Mavis Alvarez’s Diary

Why didn’t they give me that program the day before? Why do I speak with everybody who sits beside me? What happens with me and symphonic directors?

My Havana Times colleague Irina Echarry recently published an article titled “Recycle, Recycle, Recycle.” I could relate to the topic, given how much it related to me. I am a woman formed out of love for the earth and nature, and also for people, who both live and survive as a species on this planet.

Either things are moving too fast or I move so slowly that I can’t keep up. Over the last few months I haven’t been in the capital much; instead, I’ve been roaming and combing backcountry roads, observing and talking with women and men of the forest.

I don’t remember ever having asked myself what race I belonged to. I was born advantaged in a society that discriminated against non-whites. So, am I white? The answer isn’t so simple. Let’s have a look at my genealogical tree; since racial classifications don’t work with me.

I’ve lived in this neighborhood for more than a decade. Barely three blocks from my house there’s a modern six-story building, probably from the fifties. This cold, or rather chilly morning in February, the aristocratic penthouse balcony and I met each other for the first time.

The young girl that comes in next is a walking boutique. She’s dressed in the latest street fashion: A plunging neckline and a lightweight skirt, so thin that only a heroic feat maintains it in its precarious place just beneath the navel and sagging towards her pubis.

I don’t think that it ever occurred to those who created the neighborhood family doctors’ offices that they would become excellent social gathering centers for residents who are bored at home or people who have few opportunities to be listened to.

Due to those mysteries of the mind that the neuroscientists still haven’t managed to decipher, I couldn’t sleep well on Sunday. I dreamed and dreamed, so much that later I couldn’t remember anything about the dreams. And I woke up tired, absolutely muddled.

I attended the Low-Budget Thematic Film Festival in Cienfuegos as a specialist on gender issues and participated in discussions about topics as sensitive as they are urgent to address. To close one’s eyes and ears to reality does not resolve problems, it intensifies them.

If you are a woman and have also had the dubious good luck of being pretty, sensual and charming, which is very much the same thing as being flypaper in a candy store, then you will have to wait for retirement age to enjoy the enormous pleasure, of looking around on your own terms, calmly and freely, without anyone looking at you.