Author: Alfredo Fernandez

The orgy in question —which today is shocking all of Havana— is not simply the result of a drug overdose in a bar full of young immature kids, as some prefer to believe – but something worse.

The fact is that these dreamers are seduced by the overwhelming sensation produced when gliding over the water on a mere piece of fiberboard. Obviously they find this experience more exhilarating than any other in the city.

Like most other Cubans I was introduced to his work late (in the 1990s). Since his writing was prohibited on the island after the early ‘70s.

As it turns out, the country’s recently initiated process of economic restructuring aimed at ending waste has hit higher education. The number of professors —by no means squanderers— has been reduced on various community-based campuses.

When a Catalan friend visited the island, he told me that he didn’t understand why many Cubans complain so much about food shortages, because —as he put it— “You couldn’t find fatter people than here.”

When did Peru get so screwed up? So begins the great novel Conversation in the Cathedral, by Mario Vargas Llosa. It turns out that this question posed by Zavalita to a friend in a mid-1950s Lima café can be extended in time to present-day Cuba.

I doubt that in any other city on the planet there’s an element of the typical salad that’s the object of similar ostentation as that achieved by the avocado in Havana.

Blogs have put public intellectuals in a true crisis. The immense ease provided today by these online dailies for publishing texts of dubious worth —with the opinions of anyone on any issue— have cast doubt on the public intellectual’s place in the culture of the not-so-distant future.

A stewardess friend of mine told me about what happened when the airplane she was on from London made a stopover in Holguin (in eastern Cuba) before continuing on to Havana.