Erasmo Calzadilla’s Diary

Of all the people who write about Cuba today, one of those I most admire and follow is Haroldo Dilla. I know of no other person (which doesn’t mean they don’t exist) who deals with our political reality with more wisdom and depth.

Being so young, I was suddenly dazzled and amazed by a millennial-old but still living tradition, where communal and family ties still hadn’t been destroyed by capitalist or pseudo-socialist totalitarian darts.

If you want to know if a government is dictatorial, ask its representatives if there are or are not dissidents. If you get a negative answer, the more absolute it is the more it’s a symptom that things are pretty ugly.

The social dynamics of today’s world is quite confused. We often feel disoriented and alienated, even when in the midst of our own culture.

Concerning the nuclear accident in Japan, while some countries are vacillating on the issue of atomic energy, and others are holding on tight (France, the United States), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has ordered the immediate halt of a project to construct a nuclear power plant in that country.

I will try to explain a little about the term “alienation” that I constantly use in my diary entries. I assert that a circumstance of alienation exists when the environment is stiff, when it is resists accommodating our interests.

Seeing the fall of the old tyrants of the Arab world — pushed not out by other idiots like themselves, but by popular street demonstrations — was something exciting to me.

When I was little, my grandfather and my father used to take me there to fish and to walk along its banks.

The alienation stemming from “state socialism” and “capitalism” takes place despite having taken different roads, and they wind up looking pretty much alike. The question now is “what is to be done?”