Back when the complete works of Lenin adorned the living rooms of Cubans, there were no color TV sets, everyone went to the movies and US dollars were the Phantom of the Opera, Albert told his best friend that he was a homosexual. At the time, no one used the word “gay” and “homosexual” was a sophisticated and rather strange term. The common word people used was “faggot.”
Three months ago, at the funeral parlor in La Lisa, Havana, Luis showed me why he is renowned for never missing a wake. He was among the first to arrive. “This is one of the ugliest, lesser known funeral parlors in Havana,” he said when he saw me.
I had decided not to write about Pancho again, but, on the night of Thursday, October 8, Pancho confirmed everything I’d been told. The drain was to one side of a bank in Old Havana. Cucaracha showed up with a crowbar. They quickly lifted the lid.
Caroline Wallace was only a little girl when she saw the rock fortress at the entrance to Santiago de Cuba’s port for the first time. She was accompanying her father, the new US consul to the Caribbean city, where she lived with hum for six years.
Her name was Felicia, and she was a prostitute back when it was good business to be one in Havana. She continued to be a hooker after 1959, when all gambling establishments were shut down and prostitution was declared illegal and actively persecuted.
Havana’s tomb raiders of old have today met their match. His name is Pancho. He doesn’t look for treasures in the world of the dead. He does so in the dark tunnels where the city’s shit ends up: the sewers.
In a previous article, I mentioned how adjusting education to daily life involves a challenge for society. We don’t only want children and young people to go to school. We also want them to learn what society needs them to learn there.
The ups and downs of history and ill intentions of individuals have made us forget the history – today incomplete – of an institution we could well call the mother of the Cuban nation: freemasonry. However we know more about freemasonry in the United States, whose symbols adorn cities and dollar bills, than about its significance to our own history.
The Cuban State spends a considerable part of its limited resources on education. Why, then, is our educational system facing a crisis? Reality changed as of the 1990s when Teachers began to leave the classrooms.
The most recent historical developments on our continent have made the word “liberalism” something of a commonplace, but the concept behind this term has been linked to our schools of thought for at least two hundred years.