Veronica Vega

Not long ago my mother turned 71. An event that mattered to few but made me reflect deeply. I remember the sort of feeling of immunity she gave us, my sisters and me, when we were little.

Whenever I’m forced to come to grips with our waning cooking-oil ration (even though I pour it in a bottle whose eyedropper cap allows me to manage it carefully), I think back to an incident that I experienced years ago with a tourist from Curacao, a friend of the family.

On Wednesday I watched the Mass officiated by his Holiness Benedict XVI on television. I confess that despite all the political tensions that the event caused (implicitly and explicitly), despite the rapidly deployed machinery of improvised tolerance and ecumenism, I felt a huge relief with respect to the tone of the speech.

Due to my almost non-existent internet access (a distressing condition), I’ve had no dialogue with you, the readers of my articles, though I always appreciate your attention. This time I would like to dedicate a few words that were prompted by the comments to my post titled “Civility Threatened in Cuba”.

I saw a Cuban documentary about elementary school education here. To teach the pronunciation of the letter “f,” the teacher used the word “firearm” – not flower, or fiesta or fun…words that are closer to children. With an emphatic pause, she pronounced: FIRE-ARM, and proceeded to make those innocent students repeat those same syllables.

One of the greatest examples of dignity I’ve ever seen in my life was shown to me by a little sparrow, that bird that’s so common in cities, the ones that search for crumbs on sidewalks and streets to the indifference of passersby.

I have to say that this might sound unbelievable, but I assure you that it’s 100 percent true. Some time ago, I started experiencing a strange anxiety every time I had to go to a store (one that sells goods in hard currency).

As I mentioned in a previous post, my mother told me that she had invited my 21-year-old niece to go see Fernando Perez’s film “Marti and the Eye of the Canary”. When this young woman replied, “I’m not watching that shit,” I was stunned.