Author: Erasmo Calzadilla

At the moment I am not completely without work, since I’m still under contract as a professor with a night school. Through this I’ve been able to untangle myself without problems and have even been able to contract for more hours of classes than previously.

The teaching of values is a wonderful endeavor. I appreciate it as an attempt to educate human beings in a more comprehensive manner, and not to reduce it to the transmission of techno-scientific knowledge to students presumed to be politically neutral.

It’s a common belief on this side of the planet that if you were to dig a hole deep enough, you’d come up perhaps in the backyard of a house or the grounds of a temple, or in some stadium in China. In a simplistic way, we might expect China to be our geographical antipode and would also be so in terms of political questions.

It is no less true that I am bitter with living under an oppressive and paternalistic régime that wants to control everything and that removes from people the possibility to develop themselves as the protagonists of their own lives; that’s how I see things.

The few examples of democracy that have been given to the world have in fact occurred – and not without reason – under the danger of foreign attack; that is to say, foreign aggression is not an excuse for refraining from the call for self-government, but just the opposite.

What a tremendous accomplishment it was that we Cubans – resolved to trace our own path – gathered enough courage to shake ourselves free of the tutelage of the United States.

The presence of Verela at that concert was for me stranger than my family having transformed their Sunday routine. How was it that this man -who I have always known for being rebellious and an iconoclast- was singing amid that ocean of vacuous symbols and euphoria?

You had to see the face of the head of personnel at the Lenin School when he saw that sheet. “This is nasty!” he said to himself, and then commented to me, “We’ll have to do some checking. Call me in a couple days.”

I have etched in my mind an image that I’ve seen a lot on TV and in the movies. It’s one of how people look for work in those countries where those series and movies come from: the job seeker opens up a newspaper full of offers and begins circling those that might suit them.

As I leafed through the books in a secondhand bookstore the other day, my eyes stopped on a shelf I always avoid: law. I have always thought that law books are a compilation of pedantries; however, this time I put my prejudices aside and found very interesting things there.