Daisy Valera’s Diary

I still don’t sell different varieties of coffee on some corner in the Vedado neighborhood, nor do I cook Mexican dishes that would break with our national culinary monotony.

Precisely because the bureaucrats have not been frank with the people or respected them, masses of people have lost confidence in the ability of the “socialist” ruling class to move the country forward.

The Communist Party Congress was not the balm that healed the economic wounds of the last couple decades. It was more like the same old pill demanding additional effort and sacrifice.

In the comments responding to one of my posts, “When Your Wages Can’t Stretch,” someone asked me the question of how I survived when my pay ran out. Here’s my reply.

Trotsky’s works especially filled me with arguments during my reality as a university student anxious for answers and solutions. He cured me of indifference and filled in the holes in the words “socialism,” “communism” and “revolution.”

About a month ago — for the first time in my life — I went up the stairway to what we call a “Marriage Palace.” There in the hall a group of small business people rushed at me with all types of cards.

Today was the happiest day in the whole month of work – but also the most frustrating. I waited in line, which tends to be long and slow, thrilled for my turn to get paid.

She screamed: “Come on! I’m telling you to come on! Come on and stab me here!” The screams, a mixture of hysteria and powerlessness, paralyzed me there where I stood.

Sancti Spiritus is a city that I’m incapable of missing, except when walking through its streets gazing at the red tiled roofs and elaborate ironwork of past centuries or, when I walk among the cobblestones, free of any man trying to undress me with his eyes.

I threw up my hands in amazement when I discovered the newspaper discussing what had happened in town. Yes, El Escambray (“the official organ of the Provincial Committee of the Communist Party in Sancti Spiritus”) was actually telling us something about what was going on.