Author: Alfredo Fernandez

There are people like myself in Cuba today who struggle to eliminate racial prejudices. Some of them have begun to refer to themselves using a term that to my way of thinking, far from dignifying the struggle obstructs it.

Years ago Rocío shocked the Cuban visual arts world with her exhibit “Machos Marineros, Marinos,” which exposed one of the paths of human desire: that experienced by sailors every time they confirm their loneliness on the high seas.

When I was just a boy, I had dreamed of being a college student. However, upon finishing high school, the stones of the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, impacting the center of life of those of us in Cuba.

Few foreign cities have such a vital importance in the imagination of people in another country as the city of Miami has for Cubans. Always treated with hostility by the official State media, but often idealized by the average Cuban on the street, Miami today is for many Cubans on the island the closest thing to the “Cuban dream.”

A friend asked me for my New Year’s predictions for Cuba. I —who don’t include optimism among my strong points— consented to this with what I consider a sound presage.

Omar got a job at the French embassy, but since he didn’t have anywhere to live, he deprived himself of everything humanly possible to gradually build his own house. He accomplished this feat after six years.

I just finished Leonardo Padura’s latest novel, “The Man Who Loved Dogs.” The work, says the Cuban writer in the book’s epilogue, investigates the “perversion of the great utopia of the 20th century”: socialism. He asserts that this utopia was wrecked by the same people who “invested their hopes” in it.

Once again, I ask myself how I can think about one letter if I don’t know the content of the other. I would like to read it, but I already know that I will have to look for it via other media.

At midnight on December 31, the world will enter the second decade of the 21st century – but we Cubans will enter the third. And it’s not that Cuba opted for a calendar different from the Gregorian one; other pressures forced us to change two for three.

As mediocrity and deterioration become the norm in all settings and institutions of the country, there exist people who say “that’s enough.” With humanism, free of indolence and apathy, they carry out work that -if only because of the conditions and the time in which it is performed- is more than enough to be admired.