Author: Daisy Valera

I don’t like baseball, and though the province where I was born has one of the best teams in the country, I flatly refuse to participate in the collective emotion.

The conversation I had the other day with three friends came out of the almost naked phallus of that actor who played a bull in the play “Fiesta Brava,” which was dedicated to an analysis of the brutality of bullfighting.

Given my habit of running five simple laps around the track at the University Stadium, I noticed the number of people coming out to the field was increasing as the beginning of the games approached.

In recent times, groups like these have proliferated in Cuba. It’s increasingly frequent for them to swoop down on you in street with divinatory phrases like “Christ will save you,” or for you to run into groups of teenagers and youth singing praise to the Lord.

For many years Cuba was tied culturally with Russia. A number of generations of Cubans did their university and other types of studies in several of the republics that made up the USSR.

Many youth will be motivated to join the workforce due to the critical economic situation of their families, though they haven’t thoroughly considered the fact that concurrent studying and working can negatively impact on their academic performance.

A video recently fell into my hands on the events that occurred about three months ago at ISA (the Superior Institute of Art). This came to me through means more efficient than Cuban television, which instead of being a medium of enlightenment can wind up being a medium of disinformation.

A strange new outlet has appeared on the corner of 23rd and 12th streets, in the Havana district of Vedado. I went up to the window and could witness that in this store they were selling —incredibly enough— products that we Cubans had only seen in “dollar stores” selling in CUCs.

Many choose this night to meet up with friends, to have a good time and to sing. Others give it more historical meaning and feel moved, because they come to this event as examples of the unity and strength of FEU (the Federation of University Students).

This is an expression of solidarity with the drivers because people know that these workers —like themselves— certainly aren’t paid a wage that’s enough to live on.