Author: Alfredo Fernandez

While I was walking along with a friend who was visiting Santiago visited for the first time, our curiosity was whetted by the pervasiveness of the graffiti.

Even those people who never met Mr. Hershey himself, speak highly of him in respect for his glorious accomplishments in Cuba from 1916 to 1946, when, among other things, he was behind the building of one of the most prosperous sugar refineries the island ever saw.

I didn’t have great expectations concerning the expected speech by the president this past July 26th at “Che” Guevara Square in the city of Santa Clara, but I was (and am) concerned about the excessive delay in the implementation of measures needed to pump fresh air into the suffocating national economy.

Every time this event is held, one observation has become customary among many Cubans. To us, what is impressive is not so much the teams that participate in the competition, but the fans that accompany them to such matches.

Here, after five decades of Revolution, we have ended up losing all capacity to listen and understand other points of view that are not our own. That’s why my first response to any criticism is primitive, automatically assuming the observation made of me to be unjust.

It seems that these owners of corporations have as their only goal in life leaving money for their children, with the sole inconvenience being that to enjoy so much money they’ll need a planet on which to do it.

In Cuba we all have a file. If you’re a student, you have one at your school; if you work, it’s at your workplace; and if you neither study or work, or if you study and work, you have another file at your neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR).

About a week ago, a conversation arose between co-workers regarding the phenomenon of how, at the street level, people have thousands (millions?) of common ideas about how to improve the country’s situation.

“Everything from here looks tiny. The hours pass and things below become distant. Sometimes I think I won’t ever walk the streets again. But what I miss most is not being able to work with the young women; I’ve already told them they need to start looking for someone else,” ruefully quipped 86-year-old guitarist Sarvelio Fuentes.

No, this is not the sign-off call from a Cuban police officer from their checkpoint, but the guarded voice of a generation that is seeing the culmination of an entire era of sterile sacrifice crowned always with the yearning for what’s basic.