Veronica Vega, Author at Havana Times

Raising the Level of Difficulty, Cuba Like a Video Game

A friend was telling me she felt like she was in an involuntary obstacle race: “Every day, the bar I have to jump gets higher!”

I have friends, born & raised here, who claim to have no pleasant memories of their lives before emigrating, which seems so strange to me…

I often find myself remembering my bicycle, and how it shrunk the distances in Alamar, the community east of Havana where I still live.

In Cuba of the 1970s, there were no videocassette recorders, computers, or recording devices… Each moment was irreversible, like in life.

I don’t know why I remember that trip to Varadero in 2016 so much. It wasn’t really for pleasure; we were just going to pick up a tablet…

Cuba is becoming more like a big airport. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s a special land to teach us that everything is fleeting.

When people ask me why I don’t write articles anymore, I can only answer: because writing about Cuba is a devastating exercise.

I feel like, lately, I’ve only been writing about our country’s constant demise. And we’ve experienced a very violent process of destruction.

I toyed with the idea of what Cuba would be like if it ended up empty all the young people, children, pregnant and fertile women left?

My Awareness of the Two Cubas: It’s as if I have just woken up from a long dream right now, and saw a Cuba with options, solutions.