Author: Daisy Valera

Recently I’ve been thinking back to a 1971 Italian film that left me glued to my seat at Havana’s Charlie Chaplin Cinema. It was The Working Class Goes to Heaven. In it, the main character was fired from an auto parts factory, similar to how I’m no longer sitting in an office chair from 7:50 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.

There are times, places and situations in Cuba that allow us to truly understand that the much-applauded transformations underway here are no more than crumbs. They’re merely the application of a little oil and the tightening of a few nuts in the machinery, all designed to perpetuate the inertia.

His words are repeated in so many contexts, his phrases parading before our eyes and driving us almost to the edge of hysteria. His idea of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC) is now used a justification for the current one-party system.

Be careful! If you decide to walk down Obispo Street with a camera, hide it – immediately! It doesn’t matter if you have professional equipment or you’re using a little disposable camera. You might figure that on a street full of tourists and with police stationed on every block, you wouldn’t have to be so mindful.

I’ll turn 25 on January 7, but I’m not going to stop here to list my achievements or my frustrations. I was born in 1988, so I belong to neither the generation that enjoyed the benefits of the Soviet bloc nor the one that grew up breathing the fresh air of change in the ‘90s.

Every decline in the dynamic of an authoritarian power reveals the illusory character of the community that once unanimously supported it. The leasing of state-owned storefronts to food service workers is the most recent conceptual decline.

In 2013, the labor force restructuring will continue based on the principle of proven suitability, meaning that the state will distribute all those little papers for the raffle of who’s to be laid off among the recent graduates.

A Cuban elementary school. A sixth-grade classroom. A civics class. This three-element set is a kind of time machine for those who were born during the “Revolution.”

I’ve started biting my nails. I don’t end up swallowing them like I did when I was a child, when I was dying of boredom in class. Now I only chew on them carefully, avoid the cuticles. I’ve lived about 24 very “entertaining” years.