Erasmo Calzadilla’s Diary

Is Cuban filmmaker Daranas’ new film, Conducta (“Conduct”), a political film? Of course it is: politics touches everything and everything, sooner or later, rubs up against politics.

I am doing a monthly summary of the most important Cuba-related events. I fish news from here and there and season them with my profound analyses. I hope you’ll make your own contributions to the summary.

At the beginning of this year, Cuba took another important step towards “normality.” Cubans can now approach a State dealership and buy a car with nothing other than a wad of bills. The problem now is the prohibitive prices.

In recent years, the citizens of Puerto Rico and the Falkland Islands (a.k.a Islas Malvinas) were consulted regarding the status of their respective territories. Both preferred annexation or integration to a First World metropolis over independence. If Cuba were granted the possibility of choosing, what would its citizens decide?

Alexis Jardines is a Cuban professor of philosophy who immigrated a few years ago to the United States. I met him in Havana some years before and we had some conversations, not always so pleasant. On political matters Jardines was an uncompromising hard line and apparently still is.

The way people in Havana have reacted to the high prices of automobiles in this new State market is staggering. People who don’t even earn enough to get through the month are appalled with the news, as though the real possibility of purchasing a vehicle had been ripped from their hands.

If we’re to believe science and our biological temperature sensors, industrial civilization and the world we live in as a whole will be gasping for air in less than two decades. The shortage of raw materials, the ecological catastrophe and the trauma of falling from so high will turn everything we know upside down.

December tends to accentuate my awareness of time. Before, I used to hop onto January as carefree as someone crossing a line painted on the sidewalk. Lately, however, I’ve been taking the whole process more seriously.

Mandela was a man and a symbol: an icon of the struggle against apartheid and injustice, but also a case study that shows us how “the apparatus” can subordinate even its most astute opponents to its own interests.

Our friendship began almost a decade ago. Every night, returning home from work, I would find him lying on the dirt near the bus stop – old, scrawny, his skin covered with disease, slow in his gait, hungry and, most noticeably, sad, very sad. No one was able to tell me where that sorry-looking beast had come from.