Alfredo Prieto’s Diary

For some time now, the Senior Centers have multiplied at an ever more accelerated pace. Their members can be seen doing Tai Chi exercises in the park, amid an urban landscape that appears to accompany them in their pilgrimage towards that voyage with no return.

Meanwhile, to the north of the Rio Bravo, on the other side of one of the most porous borders in the world, the occurrence has been like grist to the mill of the essentialists, ready to accuse others of being the cause of almost all their troubles and to add an additional element to the logic of their xenophobia.

Born in the economic crisis of the 1990s, at a time when the government was scrambling in its capacity as employer, they came to be known as “merolicos”, a word meaning “informal vendor,” which was added to the Cuban vocabulary from a Mexican soap opera.

Cuba emerged as the country that has experienced the greatest recent renaissance in the entire world. In the 1990s, when the food crisis hit rock bottom, the massive sale of hamburgers in many cafeterias was touted as constituting a stable source of protein for the citizenry.

After passing through all the security checks with no problems, but before getting on the plane, an airport official came through the line separating out some of the passengers. He approached me courteously, signaled to me and asked me to step out of the line.

I met Pepe Marchan some years ago at the University of Tulane in New Orleans, during an academic event that brought together a number of Cubans from both shores of the Florida Straits. Pepe had been brought to the United States during Operation Peter Pan in 1961.

About six years ago, I went to a store in Cambridge, Mass., part of a chain known as Bread and Circus, with two women friends from the U.S. They had asked me to accompany them to purchase a young turkey for Thanksgiving.

My aunt Meca called me with the news: the United States Interests Section in Havana had denied her a visa to go and see her sister Lala, an elderly woman over seventy who has lived in Tampa since before 1959.