Alfredo Fernandez’s Diary

This brief piece has its roots in an unpleasant impression that has filled me in recent days, fueled by three refusals to grant interviews for this site, the Havana Times.

This past New Year’s I visited my parents in Santiago de Cuba, and —like I always do— I went another 25 miles to my grandmother’s house in the municipality of Palma Soriano. There I regained contact with a figure that’s very close to my emotional memories and which is also one of the most interesting in eastern Cuba: the radio.

There are people like myself in Cuba today who struggle to eliminate racial prejudices. Some of them have begun to refer to themselves using a term that to my way of thinking, far from dignifying the struggle obstructs it.

Years ago Rocío shocked the Cuban visual arts world with her exhibit “Machos Marineros, Marinos,” which exposed one of the paths of human desire: that experienced by sailors every time they confirm their loneliness on the high seas.

When I was just a boy, I had dreamed of being a college student. However, upon finishing high school, the stones of the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, impacting the center of life of those of us in Cuba.

Few foreign cities have such a vital importance in the imagination of people in another country as the city of Miami has for Cubans. Always treated with hostility by the official State media, but often idealized by the average Cuban on the street, Miami today is for many Cubans on the island the closest thing to the “Cuban dream.”

A friend asked me for my New Year’s predictions for Cuba. I —who don’t include optimism among my strong points— consented to this with what I consider a sound presage.

Omar got a job at the French embassy, but since he didn’t have anywhere to live, he deprived himself of everything humanly possible to gradually build his own house. He accomplished this feat after six years.

I just finished Leonardo Padura’s latest novel, “The Man Who Loved Dogs.” The work, says the Cuban writer in the book’s epilogue, investigates the “perversion of the great utopia of the 20th century”: socialism. He asserts that this utopia was wrecked by the same people who “invested their hopes” in it.

Once again, I ask myself how I can think about one letter if I don’t know the content of the other. I would like to read it, but I already know that I will have to look for it via other media.