Author: Erasmo Calzadilla

Values are of course a magnificent tool for dominating from “within,” and thus exercising total power. After instilling them (that’s to say installing them), the manipulation of people is quite easy. It’s as if they were marionettes.

I’m thankful to those who comment on my writings in Havana Times; I’m eager to read all their remarks sooner or later. It’s very important to me to know what they’re thinking and saying. Plus, they give me company and help me feel I’m not talking to myself, like some lunatic.

A short while after my linguistic discovery, a spelling rage broke out across our country; campaigns and diagnostic exams were initiated that revealed alarming findings in terms of the incorrect use of language, a form of poverty that included even students in higher education.

It’s unnecessary to do any “educational work” with children for them to begin poking around at everything that surrounds them. Born within them is a natural way of marveling at everything that appears before them, but then school takes charge – gradually killing the marvelous thirst they’re endowed with (at least schools I’ve experienced and known).

We’re living in interesting moments today here in Havana. You can feel a kind of volatility characteristic of times of change, although it’s subtle and probably wouldn’t be noticed by an unobservant foreign visitor.

To make it more theatrical, so the lesson serves as example, they often put on a show before other colleagues, who at that moment drop their jaws in the shock of discovering how seditious you really were and that they hadn’t realized it.

Although the concrete problems of the neighbors will never directly end up on this bulletin board, I’d say there existed a better relationship between the abstract and the concrete…that’s to say between the heroes and our leader on the one hand, and real flesh-and-blood people on the other.

I’m by no means an expert in death, but with half a lifetime covered, I’ve now accumulated some experience. Heading for abyss, I’ve seen the loss of one grandfather, four close friends (three by suicide and one from an accident), several dogs and cats (who were also good friends), distant relatives and many others. The conclusion I’ve drawn from all this: if death is ugly, the wake and the funeral are uglier.

I met Tonito when I was studying at the V. I. Lenin Pre-university High School of Exact Sciences. Not everyone there had such a noble soul or sharp brain. It was a pleasure to be around him. But Tonito had one “defect”: a kind of malice toward “socialism,” that’s to say he was against the regime of the island, which calls itself socialist. And this was in a school where to study there, by statute, one had to be “revolutionary.”