Author: Caridad

In the taxi, you can talk politics more openly and without fear of any type, or about the cockfight you went to over the weekend, the latest model Ipod that your cousin is trying to sell, or all the news that’s not fit to print. It is like a rolling duty-free zone, or a confession box.

I was no more than 10 years old, but I had already seen enough Russian (war) movies in which the bombs had no respect for anything. They might blow to pieces a cute little dog, or obliterate a house or explode right on top of a child.

To make the walk through the dark streets of Central Havana go quicker, I began to think about what might happen to me before reaching home that could serve as subject matter for one of these diaries. Then several meters before arriving at my stop the bus came to a halt.

Yesterday my father went to a store to buy a towel. The saleswoman looked at him and declared, “Here we charge in hard currency” and then turned her back. To her it appeared that he was incapable of possessing the other Cuban money (CUC). To her my father looked like somebody unworthy of her attention.

I am from Cuba. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be Jamaican, Dutch, or South African. Why? Right now, while you read my thoughts, more than half of you have already begun to judge me. Why? Because for too many people, being Cuban is a moral, or even more so, a political matter.

Its keys, a bit obstinate, helped me to become stricken with numerous bouts of tendonitis, but also with more than 10 books. Most of these were lost among my various friends, submitted to literary competitions or eaten by the island’s always ravenous cockroaches.

Yokira didn’t have her own room, so to be alone and give free rein to her illusions she went to the only public place that remained open all night: the mortuary. There nobody bothered her. But her parents found out and wanted to take her to a psychiatrist. Yokira the nut, the impossible one. Yokira makes her mother ill.

A hermit crab was in the middle of the road as a car was approaching in the distance. If one of the vehicle’s four wheels lined up with it, good-bye crab, not even its hard snail like shell would save it from being squashed.

It’s a long way to get to my house. I leave work in the evening, and the bus drops me close to a mile away. Last night, like almost always, I had to make that trip after ten o’clock. Walking in front of me was a man, who I tried to maintain a certain distance from.

Though most of us here have ever known the terrible experience of war, no one in Cuba is unaware the word “fight.” No one here escapes having to “fight” or “struggle.”
Even if you don’t have the knack for being a merchant, somehow we find a way to sale any object that might have any value.