Veronica Vega

If one were to believe in some theory of malicious omniscience, they could easily demonstrate this by observing the development of alternative culture in Cuba.

What kind of country are we building? Is it a nation where we see ourselves forced to live here or the one that we exaggerate with our desires?

Passing in front of the Saratoga Hotel in Old Havana, I saw a photo that caught my attention. It wasn’t that the teenager in the photograph was so attractive, instead I was drawn in by the slogan at the top of the picture: “Noble Havana.”

Today has been a strange one. So much so that I’ve ended up thinking that the line between telling the truth and lying is as blurry as mythomaniacs believe. After all is said and done, if you pay attention to those self-help manuals, in which everything depends only on oneself, then why do we complain so much if the world is in our own hands?

No one really believes a person can disappear with the snap of a finger or through some illusion by David Copperfield. Yet everybody hopes that with the next snap, the missing person will reappear, even if wearing different clothes and in another place on the stage.

Someone told me that the sinister secret is that the original mixture of butter with water and shortening is whipped up in blenders to greatly increase the volume.

“I used to stop traffic!” she said with pride, as she drew in the air those voluptuous curves of hers that had disappeared with age, the grief of misery and the tortures of schizophrenia.

When I’ve gone to that school, on more than one occasion I’ve felt that the logic of my world implodes when I enter that place. It’s as if it is governed by different laws. But I took a deep breath and spoke with the head of my son’s grade level.

A friend once told me this joke: Do you know the definition of a “specialist”? It’s someone who knows increasingly more about decreasingly less.

My son will finish junior high school (ninth grade) in a month and half. Wearing his sole uniform, with the shirt having been torn and mended several times due to its being washed daily, I watched as he went into his school. Its walls are covered with peeling paint, and it’s not allowed to take pictures.