Veronica Vega

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.

“Politics is the dirtiest thing there is,” I’ve often heard said. “It’s nothing more than prostitution. Tonight they’re with one, and tomorrow with another.” However, since I began going to school, and without realizing it, I’ve become part of politics.

I admit that it astonishes me to hear that socialism is (still) the sole chance for a more just world. Those who self-define themselves as “left” also are amazed that I don’t identify myself with their line.

Since I read the post “Guilty until proven innocent,” on several occasions I felt compelled to respond to its author, who posted her thought’s here on this Cuba focused online magazine.

In that spring of 1980, with the events at the Peruvian embassy in Havana and the mass exodus from the port at Mariel, my family too aspired to be part of that multitude of people who crammed onto boats almost to the point of their capsizing.

When I was a little girl, I remember having seen my mother standing in the kitchen doorway on more than one occasion with a depressed look. When I would ask her what was wrong, she would respond, “It’s that I don’t know what I’ll cook today.” I would simply shrug my shoulders and then scamper away to play.

It seems that a very young teacher, when referring to the author of the well-known book “The Little Prince,” gave as a biographical fact that he was a bad pilot and had many problems because he would become distracted when flying airplanes.

Miguel believed that his being accepted into the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) would finally release him from the curse of being a self-taught painter, meaning someone who couldn’t exhibit his works for sale in authorized galleries.