Author: Ariel Glaria

There was a box with Christmas tree decorations among my grandmother’s things. Finding it was like finding treasure.

Prometheus, god of fire, grant me light. I’m not asking for something as volatile as lighter fluid. I ask only for a simple box of matches.

I’ve been flicking through some books recently, searching for answers. One of these books was about traditional Cuban medicine.(9 photos)

I was completely aware of the crisis that began in Cuba after the USSR collaped one morning in 1991. I was 21 and had just finished my military service.

There are books that always stay in the same place when you bring them home. However, there are other books which are always in different spots, as if they move by themselves. De los escalones para abajo, Irina Pino’s book of poems, is one of these books.

This happened when I’d just finished my military service and I didn’t want to be alone. I was 21 years old, I was independent at last and I was convinced that I could have anything I wanted.

Out of the toughest problems a writer might face, none of them seemed as hard as the simple act of writing one word after another, in K’s eyes at least. Everything boils down to this, he thought.

The following is the second part of the story in which I spent three days, of my own accord, in a Havana jail cell, thanks to my neighbor the policeman’s help, so I could stop smoking. 

The following events happened when I had exhausted every other resource I had to stop smoking, so I locked myself in jail.